Never Say Anything
by lauTOre
Summary: Don had always had a feeling that working with his brother might not go well forever, but he'd never imagined their last case to be like this. Warning: even the most beloved characters aren't immune to death.
1. A Homicide

**Disclaimer: **Maybe I shouldn't say anything about the matter, but I'm gonna say it anyway: Numb3rs and its characters don't belong to me, but to CBS. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance with actual names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.  
**Rating:** T  
**Timeline: **season 4  
**References: **to 1-03 Vector and, less explicitly, some others up to and including season 4.  
**A/N:** This had been planned as a story for the ABCs ('N' like 'NSA', which was a title idea from both whatever55 (thanks for all your input!) and myself), but turned out to be too long for that. It's plotted out and mostly written, so I'll try to post weekly.

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**Chapter 1: A Homicide**

"Hey buddy," Don greeted his brother and stepped out into the bright afternoon sun to hold up the crime scene tape for him, "thanks for coming."

"No problem," Charlie replied as he ducked under the tape. "So what's the story?"

"The victim's name is Andrew Bourgeois, 46 years old, divorced with a teenage boy who lives with the mother, worked in IT at a big telecommunications company. He lived here and we assume that he knew his killer and let him in himself sometime last night; a neighbor found him this morning. From what it looks like, there was a struggle, and in the course of that, he suffered a blow to the head. The coroner says he was probably dead within minutes, that is probably around midnight, but we'll have to wait for his report to be sure about the time and cause of death."

"Okay," Charlie nodded as he absorbed the information. By now they had reached Bourgeois's home office and he swallowed when his eyes fell on the body bag in the corner. He quickly tore his eyes away and forced himself to focus on the technicalities of this case. "So what exactly am I here for? You said something about a notebook?"

"Yeah, I did. Gerry?"

A member of the CSI unit turned around with a look on his face that seemed almost grim, as if it was a cardinal sin to interrupt him in his work.

Don, however, seemed completely unperturbed by that. "Mind showing him the notebook?"

Gerry inspected Charlie from head to toe and Charlie had to fight hard to stand the scrutinizing stare without flinching. "No touching. Are we clear on that? We only dusted the outside so far."

"Understood," Charlie said and had to clear his throat to win his self-confidence back. He wasn't sure how the guy did it, but he had an air of natural authority about him that was quite impressive. When the stern look still wouldn't vanish, Charlie put his hands in his trouser pockets. Better not be tempted.

"We found it in the inner pocket of his jacket at the wardrobe by the door, together with the receipt," Don explained. "The receipt tells us he bought that thing a little more than a week ago, but it's already more than half full, so we assume that whatever it is that's in there was important enough for him to take it with him wherever he went and work on it. We compared the handwriting to the other documents lying around, it seems to be his."

"So what exactly did he write in there?"

"It seems to be some kind of computer code. Look," he said and held the small book open with the gloves he was wearing, careful not to smear any fingerprints that might be on there. Gerry seemed to be appeased by Don's diligence and resumed his work.

Now that his fierce eyes were no longer unsettling him, Charlie could concentrate on the code he was seeing. The first page merely showed some very generic lines, the definition of the variables being used and the sort. That was what the victim had written down at the bottom of the page as well. Apparently he'd first written the code in pieces and had then, in a different color, added his thoughts or comments about it. What Charlie wasn't clear on, however, was whether this was a code that the commentator was developing himself or whether he had copied it from somewhere and was now trying to decipher it. With both options, Charlie found it strange that Bourgeois would have used a notebook to write down his ideas by hand instead of simply typing them into a suitable program immediately. On the other hand, Charlie was too often teased for writing on chalkboards as if he had dared to judge this way of working.

"This far, this is all very basic and generic," he explained to his brother, "I can't tell you anything about the program going merely by that. Can you turn a page or two?"

Don did and held the notebook out towards him. Charlie skimmed the pages, but soon slowed down.

"Turn another page," he said as he was staring at the symbols in the small book. On the next two pages, there was only code, no commenting, and thus a lot of data for Charlie to absorb and check his theory. He pressed his lips together and tried finding his mistake, but he couldn't, everything fit. He shook his head. This was wrong. This just wasn't possible...

He was clenching his hands to fists, which he was still hiding in the pockets of his jeans. The tremors that went through the rest of his body, however, couldn't be masked that easily. His biggest problem was his voice. The way he was feeling now, everyone around him would notice that something was up as soon as he would open his mouth, and he couldn't let that happen, he had to hide his agitation.

_Alright. Calm down. Breathe._

And he did breathe, although he was careful to draw in the air through his nose, slowly, not letting it show on the outside how much difficulty he was having on controlling his basic bodily functions.

"Charlie, I'm talking to you."

Charlie flinched, turned his head and was confronted with that familiar expression of annoyance on his brother's face.

"Sorry," he said and cleared his throat, "I've been thinking."

In the back of his mind, he realized that the look of annoyance was still on his brother's face, still hadn't been exchanged for mistrust, and for once he thanked his nervous disposition – and his disposition to get easily lost in his head whenever he was highly focused on something. His flinching and his tendency to block out the rest of the world had actually helped to make it more believable that he was really just absentminded instead of highly disturbed by what he was seeing.

He couldn't think about that now though, but had to put up his best show to appease Don, who was standing there expectantly. "Care to share?"

Charlie regarded the notebook while his mind was racing in order to find a way to keep up the facade. For as long as he didn't know what was going on here, he couldn't let anyone know of the significance of that code, so he had to do the best performance of nonchalance he was able to. He was well aware that Don could read him like a book, so he had to make sure that today, that book remained firmly closed.

"It's a bit difficult to explain," he said in order to buy time, but even while he was saying the words, an analogy was forming in his mind, and now the pieces were automatically assembling, making the rest easy for him. "You know, writing a complex code like this really is just about putting very basic pieces together in a unique way, like building a castle with building bricks. You can put them together in any possible combination, sometimes that'll result in something that resembles a building, that is a code that works, and sometimes all you get is an unstructured heap of bricks, that is a code that doesn't work. Now, in order to figure out what this code is for, that is what kind of building we're looking at, I need to analyze the way in which the components are connected to each other, the code's structure, and the first step to do that would be to analyze which items, that is which brick types, have been used more often and which ones less often, and in which context. If I'm going to do that, it would help me a lot to have that code completely, and digitally, so you should look where he saved it on his computer and make me a copy of that file." He indicated the computer screen they were facing and that was still up and running.

"Yeah, there might be a problem with that," Don said. "According to the CSI guys, the computer was running when we got here, but it seems as though the harddrive has been wiped clean. Our people are going to try and restore the data of course, but for now, this notebook is all we have. So any ideas what this code could be about? Any unusual patterns you see?"

Charlie bit his lip. He'd thought to have wriggled out of this dilemma rather neatly, so he wasn't at all thrilled to talk about this code any further. To tell the truth, he was still trying to hide the tremble of his hands. For a moment, he considered telling Don everything he knew, that he knew very well what this code was supposed to do, that in fact, no one knew that code better than himself since he'd been the one to write it. He knew he couldn't do that, though, certainly not here where a dozen of other agents could listen in.

He took another deep breath, disguising it as a sigh. He didn't like this one bit, but the fact was, he couldn't tell his brother anything as long as he hadn't figured out what was going on here. He needed to know how on earth that dead man had gotten hold of a code he most certainly wasn't supposed to have. All the while, he had to try not to think too much about the fact that not only had his code turned up here, but also that the guy it had turned up with had turned up dead.

He shuddered, despite himself, and forced himself to focus his attention back on Don. "I don't know," he said. "Can you tell me anything else about him? What did he –"

He stopped short, suddenly remembering what Don had told him about the murder victim earlier. "You said he was working at a telecommunications company?"

"Yeah, why? Does that help?"

Charlie shook his head and ran his hand through his hair, then stopped when he realized that he shouldn't show his nervousness to Don. "I don't know, it could." He could see Don was frowning, he was starting to suspect something, so it was high time for him to get out of here. "Look, I'll see what I can do, alright? I have to go now though, I forgot I had a meeting in a couple of minutes."

"Alright," Don said, but the frown was still on his face. "I'll make sure you'll get a transcript of that then?"

"Yeah, of course, thanks. I'm sorry, I really need to go now," he said and hastened to get out of the house.

"Alright," Don repeated as he accompanied him to the front door. "Thanks for stopping by."

Charlie just waved at him without stopping or turning around and hurried to his car.

Since he was afraid Don might watch him from the house, he drove away and only stopped after a block or two so he could think. He needed to figure out what to do, and fast. For a moment, he wondered if he shouldn't just have told Don what he knew after all. It felt wrong keeping crucial information from him in a federal case, and it occurred to Charlie that he might even be committing a criminal offense by withholding that information. On the other hand, he would most certainly commit a criminal offense by telling him, so he didn't really have much of a choice here.

So he couldn't tell Don for the time being, thus he had to figure out on his own what to do next, and to do that, he had to figure out how on earth the dead guy had gotten hold of the code. Or was he supposed to have it? Maybe he was an agent or consultant with the NSA as well? Maybe his job at the telecommunications company was only a cover? Maybe his task had been to check the code that Charlie had developed for them? That wouldn't be too far-fetched, even though they should have done that before now, before a week ago when the guy had bought the notebook. And if he had been hired by the NSA to analyze Charlie's code – then why do that at his own home, without any further security measures, at least concerning the notebook?

No, looking at the big picture, there was little chance that the dead guy had gotten hold of the code in a legal manner, and if that was true, then it meant that there was a security breach within the NSA, and that alone was enough to send shivers down Charlie's spine. He was positive about his deductions, though: if that code had showed up here, there was a high probability that someone working for the NSA had leaked it, and considering the code's purpose, Charlie had difficulty thinking of a reason that didn't entail criminal intent.

So he'd have to inform his bosses at the NSA about the leak, that was the easy part. The more disturbing question however was: if the guy that had examined the code had ended up dead – what did that mean for Charlie?


	2. That Funny Thing Called Reality

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1**  
A/N:** Thank you so much for your comments! Here you go with chapter 2. Since chapter 3 is rather short and not very plot-relevant, I'll probably squeeze that in before the weekend.

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**Chapter 2: That Funny Thing Called Reality**

"Ah, the good stuff! You're a saint, Megan," Don said smiling as he accepted the coffee from his coworker. She had just arrived as the last of his team, but her tardiness was more than redeemed by her friendly gesture of providing them with four steaming cups of coffee which, in contrast to what they could get in the break room, did not need to be banned by the Geneva Conventions.

"Have you started already?" she asked.

"No, but we were just about to," Don replied and took a sip of the hot liquid. "So Colby, did you hand off those transcripts to Charlie last night? Did he say anything else about those?"

"Yup, that he'd need to take a further look at that. When I told him it might be pretty important, he said that he'd probably have something before noon."

"Okay, good," Don said, pleasantly surprised. Noon was pretty quick, even for Charlie's standards. "If he can really do that, we might get a couple of new leads pretty soon. Until we do, any news from the coroner?"

"No news, just confirmations," David said. "The time of death was sometime between 11 pm and 1 am and the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head."

Just then, Don's cell-phone rang and he checked the caller ID while he listened to David's report. His dad. He suppressed a sigh. He hated being interrupted on the job by personal matters, and his dad knew better than to do exactly that. He rejected the call and decided to get back to him later, during his lunch break.

"The injury fits the edge of the desk where he was found and is consistent with the blood splatters we found there," David continued. "Other than that, there are only the kind of injuries that we noticed at first glance, some bruises on his arms and torso, plus two on his right leg. The coroner says they're all consistent with defensive wounds, so our theory that he got into a struggle and was killed during that seems solid."

Another ring and Don pulled his cell-phone back out of his pocket, a frown on his face. His dad again.

"I'm sorry, just give me a sec," he told his team members and answered the call. "Hey, look Dad, this is a really bad time, I'll call you back later, alright?"

"Donnie."

Don's frown deepened. The single word wasn't much to draw conclusions from, but still he realized that something was off. His father's voice had been just too strange, somehow strained and choked, as if he was in pain.

"Are you alright?"

The sounds at the other end still weren't making any sense. If Don hadn't known better, he might have thought that maybe his father was crying. That was impossible, though. He'd never seen his father cry, except for when Don's mother had died, and he still remembered that incident as disconcerting, because that image still felt utterly wrong to him.

"Dad, what's wrong? Are you in pain?"

For a moment, there was just some heavy breathing, and Don was about to call an ambulance, it seemed as though his father might be having a heart attack. Before he'd really made up his mind though, there was another one of those strange sobbing sounds, and then finally his dad's voice, "It's Charlie."

Don swallowed. Something in his father's tone had made his hackles raise. "What about him?"

"I think you should come over."

Don gripped the phone more tightly. Out of the corners of his eyes, he noticed the worried faces of his team members, but tried to block them out. He was worried enough even without them. True, he still didn't know what this was, but he knew that he didn't like the sound of his father's voice, not at all. "What's this about? What happened?"

"I really think –"

His apprehension was showing itself in increased impatience. "Tell me _now._"

"Don, I'm... Something happened, something bad. Charlie... They say he's dead."

A cold hand had taken hold of his body, encircling him tightly. Air was streaming through his nostrils, in and out, a little faster than he was used to. He became aware that he was blinking and then, a second later, he could feel that there was a lump in his throat. He tried to get rid of that, he needed to get rid of that, because it was making him nauseous and it impaired his breathing, but he could swallow all he wanted, that lump wasn't going away.

He noticed that his team members' eyes were still fixed on him, confusion and worry still there on their faces, and he was about to tell them something, to explain this to them. There were no words coming out of his mouth though, no explanation whatsoever, and he sensed a feeling of panic awaken in his guts.

"Don, are you still there?"

Don swallowed again, bracing himself to answer his dad, but there were still no words on his mind. It was as though his conscious mind was broken, and maybe that was the solution to this problem. Maybe this was his subconscious mind's doing, maybe this was one weird dream. It had to be a dream, for none of this seemed real.

"I don't understand."

The dream-Don had made the first step, it had revealed this world to be irrational and thus improbable. It was only a matter of time now before he would wake up from this nightmare.

"They say he was in a car accident," his dad explained, but instead of lessening, Don's confusion and panic grew. A car accident was something so mundane that it seemed actually possible, this was a rational notion that didn't fit at all in this illogical setting. "He..." his dad tried to go on, but broke off. There was the sobbing sound again and suddenly, Don noticed that he was biting his lip, so hard in fact that the pain got through to his mind despite the numbness of his body. He swallowed thickly, uneasily. Was it possible to feel pain while dreaming?

"He must have missed a bend and fallen down a slope," his dad interrupted his musings. "They… I'm sorry." The sobbing sound, followed by the pain in his lip. "Are you going to come?"

Don was silent. He couldn't come. He couldn't hang up just yet. He needed more information. All this wasn't making any sense, there was too much detail, too much that fitted together nicely for this to be a bad dream, but on the other hand, there was no way this was real. It couldn't be real.

"Don, please, I… I need you here."

"I'm coming," Don answered automatically and ended the call, and only a second later realized that he couldn't get the information he needed this way. He felt like calling back, but he couldn't bring himself to do that either, even though he wasn't sure why, why he felt the need to stay in this state of not-knowing.

He looked up at his team members and it seemed weird that the expressions on their faces still hadn't changed. It was as though they had been frozen in the moment while his world had fallen apart and crumbled down to pieces.

"What's wrong?" Megan asked and Don had to avert his eyes. He couldn't stand seeing the worry in hers.

He wanted to answer, he opened his mouth, but the words were still eluding him. "I don't know," he said eventually. Something was wrong with his voice, it had lost its strength, it was hardly more than a whisper now.

"That was your dad?" Colby pressed. "Something's up with Charlie?"

Don nodded, but didn't know what there was to say. There was only one sentence bouncing off again and again from the corners of his mind, leaving him dis-oriented and giving him a headache. "They say he's dead."

The room was so still that the noises from the bullpen were seeping in and Don felt the panic from his guts spread to the rest of his body, felt the heat rise to his head. Something was definitely wrong here. The confusion and worry on the faces of his team members were still there, but the dominant expression was now shock, and Don couldn't remember ever having seen such horrified expressions there. The heat was increasing further and so was his panic. Why wasn't something happening to break this off? Why wasn't he waking up from this nightmare?

"Is this a joke?"

He was seeing Colby, he'd seen his mouth moving, but he still failed to understand what was going on here. He had to blink. His eyes were suddenly burning, his lip was twitching.

He shook his head no. He still wasn't clear on what was happening, but he was pretty sure that it wasn't a joke. "They say he was in a car accident," he repeated his father's words, but found that even the mere repetition of language had become an almost unsolvable task. The burning of his eyes grew worse and he had to increase his blinking. The lump in his throat was growing, the feeling of suffocation aggravating. He needed to get out of here, he had to find the emergency exit from this situation...

Suddenly, there was a hand on his and he looked up to see Megan's face. His gaze landed on her eyes, which uncharacteristically were wet with unshed tears.

"I'm taking you home, to your dad," she said with a voice that was so husky that it hardly sounded like hers.

She stood, so Don followed her example. He was almost at the door when he realized that whether or not this was a dream, he still had to act rationally, he had to act as if this was actually reality.

"I can't just leave."

"Yeah, Don, you can," David said. His voice was strange too, Don noticed, somehow raucous, and his need to get away from this situation was threatening to drown him. "You need to stay with your dad now. We have it all covered here."

Don just nodded and didn't say another word, tried not to think another thought, until he and Megan had reached his SUV.

"Your keys," Megan said and held her hand out towards him.

Don regarded first the hand, then the look in her eyes. She didn't look like she should be driving, definitely not his car. He pulled out his car keys from his pocket with every intent to get behind the steering wheel himself, but when he saw his trembling hand, when he felt how his whole body was shaking, he surrendered and got in on the passenger's seat.

Seeing the trouble he had fastening his seat-belt with those trembling hands, the heat was back in his head and he buried it in his cool, almost clammy hands. There was no more denying it, something was definitely wrong here.

_They say he's dead._

Don shuddered, despite himself. That phrase still wasn't making any sense. Who was 'they'? Why would they tell his father something like that? And how could they be so sure about that anyway? And if they were sure, why wasn't his father? Why hadn't he just said, _he's dead_, why the need to add that factor of secondhand, of insecurity?

He drew in air through his nose, forcing himself to make it a deep breath and trying to ignore the trembling of his body. Something was up, alright, something was wrong. However, as long as Don didn't have the answers to these questions, as long as he hadn't figured out what was going on here, there was no reason to panic. He had to maintain his calm and wait until he had all the answers before he could start thinking about the implications of that phrase, anything else would have been nothing but masochism.

Desperate to occupy his mind with something else, anything else other than that phrase, Don's mind jumped back to a time when Charlie's being alive had been an uncontested fact, when the possibility of his death had been pushed to a couple of decades ahead of their time. In front of his inner eye, he could distinctly see him leave yesterday's crime scene, waving at him without even turning around as he hurried back to his car. To think that it had only been yesterday, that not even 24 hours had passed since then, suddenly seemed as unreal as whatever it was that Don was experiencing at this very moment, as if that incident and that phrase belonged to two different worlds.

Don bit his lip and in his mind, he focused on that curly back of his brother's head and on that wave, denying himself the possibility that the waved good-bye might have been a good-bye forever.

Without another word spoken between him and Megan, they arrived at Charlie's house and opened the door. His father met them there, he must have heard them in the driveway. Don endured his hug, but refrained from letting himself get emotional. He needed to get his facts straight first.

"I want to know what happened," he said.

His dad nodded silently and led them inside. While they were taking their seats in the living-room, Don fought to hide his impatience. He failed. "What happened to Charlie?" he asked again. He'd assumed the same tone he used on his job, during interrogations, and the acting skills he'd acquired there were helping him a lot now.

"He was in a car accident," his dad repeated, obviously trying for a sober tone. The effect was somewhat destroyed by the low volume of his voice and the expression on his face that was dominated by his red-rimmed eyes.

"How do you know that?" Don interrupted him before he could go on further. He didn't need any colorful details about the accident before he could be sure that the accident had really occurred.

"The police told me. Two officers came here earlier."

"LAPD?"

His dad nodded. "They said… they said they'd found Charlie's car at the bottom of that steep slope between CalSci and here. He must have lost control over the vehicle. They say it's likely that..." He was interrupted by another sob and had to try again. "It's likely that he was dead on impact."

Don was trying to take it all in, but found that he was having much more difficulty doing that than should be expected, as though there was some kind of wall in his mind trying to block out the information his father was giving to him. And yet, Don couldn't help but notice that the information was indeed making sense.

He stood on shaky legs and ran his hands over his face, tried to walk up and down as if he might thereby escape the horrid truth, desperate to find a solution to this problem. There was only one explanation on his mind, though. This was real. It couldn't be a dream, for there was no way he could be sleeping and at the same time feel that burning, tearing pain in his chest.

He felt the water come to his eyes and hastened to wipe them dry before the tears could form. Then he sat back down, his legs were no longer holding him. He felt his father's heavy arm around his back and swallowed, trying to get rid of the choked sensation caused by the tightness of his throat, by the pressure on his chest, by the weight on his shoulders. He felt his father's fingers clutch into his arm, felt his father's pain that was the sole cause for the strength of his grip, and finally his facade crumbled to pieces. He couldn't go on denying it, there were no more loopholes to escape the truth. This was real, the pain was real, and all his attempts at shutting his eyes from reality were a lost fight. His brother was dead. That was the explanation for all this, the cold, hard fact that yielded to logic regardless of the consequences. His brother was gone, and his absence was final. Unlike a bad dream that had at least the decency to let him wake up eventually, reality was brutal enough to destroy his world and leave behind nothing but the broken pieces that would never become whole again.

No, reality was merciless and irreversible. All his denial wouldn't be able to change this. Nothing could bring his brother back to life, and when he realized that, he finally let the tears come.


	3. Questions and Answers

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1**  
A/N:** Thank you so much for your enthusiasm concerning this story! I'm just hoping that I won't belie your expectations.

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**Chapter 3: Questions and Answers**

"I want to see him," Don said when his tears had stopped. He was putting a lot of effort into giving his voice a steady, determined tone as if that could erase the weakness he'd shown earlier.

He met his father's gaze, but quickly looked away again. He just couldn't stand seeing those red-rimmed eyes.

"I don't think we can," his dad said. His voice was still a little husky, but he was keeping it so low that it was hardly noticeable, and Don was thankful for that. "He's being examined. They said they needed the coroner's examination to make sure it's him."

Don frowned. "Why do they need a coroner for identification? Why didn't they ask us to do that?"

He saw his dad look down at his hands and felt Megan's hand in his back. "What?" he asked, irritation masking his confusion and insecurity.

"Donnie… the car caught fire. It was some time before someone noticed, so it… There wasn't much left when they managed to put the fire out."

Don stared at him, at that bent down head where the cruel words had come from, and felt suddenly nauseous. He'd seen his fair share of burnt corpses in his career, and to think that now his own little brother might be…

He shook his head vehemently as if he could thereby get those unwanted images out of his head. "So how do they know it's him? They can't be sure before they did the identification!"

There was confusion in his father's eyes and a layer of concern. "Don, it was his car. Who else would it be?"

"Well, I don't know!" Don said and stood, restarting his pacing. He didn't know what was making him so angry, he just knew that he didn't want this. He didn't want to sit here having to wonder what had happened and whether or not his brother was dead. Much less, however, did he want to sit here and _know_ that his brother was dead.

He could feel the tears pressing against the back of his eyes again and bit his lip to prevent them from spilling. He knew he was grasping at straws. His father was right, it was Charlie's car, it had been found between CalSci and his house and Don knew the slope where it had happened, there had been accidents in the past. Only last year a young woman had tumbled down there and ended up in a wheelchair. It was all making sense, it was all very simple, and that was exactly what Don couldn't stand.

"Why did it take them so long to put the fire out?" he asked, determined to poke around in this case until he would have found the error, the one piece of information that made the house of cards crumble and reveal that this was all just a very bad dream after all. "If it's the bend I'm thinking of, that's not _that_ remote a spot."

His dad sighed. "It is at night. They said the accident must have occurred sometime between 4 and 5 am."

"But why should Charlie have driven home from CalSci at that time of night?"

His father sighed again and buried his head in his hands as though it was hurting, so it was Megan's turn to break the straw Don was grasping at. "You know that wasn't unusual for him, Don. He'd probably been working. Maybe on our case, he'd said he wanted to show us some results this morning."

Don stared at her, his mouth hanging open. He quickly closed it and swallowed. His mouth felt suddenly dry. It was making sense. Charlie had been working late, he'd been tired, so he'd missed the bend. It was all making such a damn lot of sense…

"Don..." she started again with a tone that told him all too well that he wasn't going to like what she was about to say. "You need to accept that he's gone. The sooner you do that, the better it'll be for you."

Don clenched his jaw and tore his gaze away from her, intently staring at a curiously shaped spot on the table. "We should wait for the coroner's report before we inform anybody else," he said and had to realize that his voice had lost its steadiness. Still, he wouldn't let go of his last straw for as long as he could help it. This was his last chance of keeping Charlie alive, and he'd do that for as long as he could. "As long as we don't know it's really him, we shouldn't get everyone worked up over this."

His dad sat up straight then as if electrified. "I haven't called CalSci yet, I completely forgot. They'll be wondering why Charlie didn't show up for his lectures."

"Well, there's still time, he only has lectures in the afternoon today, so let's just wait for them to make a positive identification, alright?"

Neither one dared to object, but Don could feel that they didn't exactly agree with his way to proceed. He wasn't deterred, though. As long as he didn't have scientific proof that Charlie was dead, he was still alive, and any other solution to this sick application of Schroedinger's Cat was simply not practical.

In order to get through waiting, Don began pacing the living-room, every now and then retreating to the dining-room whenever his father lost the fight against the tears. He had to admit that he was glad that Megan was here to take care of him, even though he was aware that it would have been his task to console his dad. He couldn't do that, though. His whole energy was being used for keeping himself upright and keeping his emotions in check, he couldn't empathize with another grieving individual on top of that.

He was looking at his watch almost constantly, and it didn't elude him that checking the time was a fairly good method to keep the nagging questions unheard, to shut the truth out. It couldn't be long now. They've had Charlie's DNA profile in their databases ever since Charlie had started consulting for them, so all they needed to do was extract the DNA from the burn victim and compare it to his. That could only take a couple of hours, and they might already have started when Don had learned about the accident, right?

It was another hour before they heard the gravel crunch in the driveway. Don was the first one at the door and opened it before the two LAPD officers even had a chance to ring the bell. He tried to get clues as to the news they were bearing from the expressions on their faces, but all he noticed was that they were looking tired, and he figured that this had to be their last task before ending their shift.

"So," the lieutenant said when they had gotten over with the introductions – which had been entirely pointless, since Don immediately forgot their names anyway – and were seated in the living-room. "As we said earlier we would, Mr. Eppes, we came back with the results of the coroner's examination." Don was hanging at his lips, so he was filled with a stinging sense of impatience when the lieutenant paused before going on. "I'm sorry to inform you," he finally said, "that our initial suspicion has been confirmed. The DNA of the corpse matches your son Charlie. I'm sorry for your loss."

Don was still watching the mouth, but still failed to understand. Before he could, the lieutenant went on, "We assume that he was driving above the speed limit and lost control over his car, that's what everything's pointing to." He moistened his lips and spoke quietly to Don's dad, "It might help you to know that from what things are looking right now, it seems that your son didn't have to suffer. The coroner says that given his injuries, it's very likely that he died on impact, so he was already dead when the car caught fire."

There was silence and his words were ringing in Don's ears, still eluding understanding.

"We're going to finish the accident report within the next couple of days and we'll come back to you in case there should be any new developments," the lieutenant said and stood. "Again, our sincere condolences. We can see ourselves out," he ended before they fled the house of mourning.

Don stared at the closed door and blinked while he noticed his breathing accelerating. He glanced briefly at his dad, who was hiding his face in his hands, and stood, started his pacing again. It didn't get better, though. His chest was being constricted, like someone had put a rope around it and was pulling at its ends as hard as he could, making Don feel like he was suffocating, like he was about to implode. He tried to take deeper breaths, tried to get in air, but just as he was struggling to do that, he felt as though the ceiling was coming down towards him as if to bury him. His head felt hot, like he was having a fever, like he was going to pass out any minute, and he knew he had to get away.

Without another word, he stormed out through the back door into the yard, even stumbling a little. Breathing was a little easier here, there was no ceiling coming down, but the rope around his chest was still there, still constricting, still suffocating him. He walked a few steps along the house, then towards the fence, then back again, not knowing where to go, feeling his legs tremble, feeling feverish. At last, when he thought his legs might give way under him any moment, he sat down, and when he realized where his legs had taken him, he couldn't hold back the tears. Charlie's koi pond. Only that now, it had stopped being Charlie's koi pond, for Charlie no longer existed, just like that, with a flick of his fingers.

The tears were coming for real now, streaming down his face. He could no longer hold them back, couldn't even wipe them away. He couldn't do anything but feel that big, empty hole inside him, a wound that had been ripped open and done a kind of damage that Don didn't think could ever be repaired. Given the pain he was experiencing, the rope around his chest, but much more those relentless, agonizing stabs in his heart, it was even difficult to imagine that he should be able to survive this agony for very long. Thinking about the future was making him scared anyway, for right now, all he could see ahead of him was pain and grief and longing. The present, however, was equally unbearable, with that indomitable hell raging in his heart and consuming him, slowly burning him as though it might be kind enough to let him meet his brother's fate, but never giving him the kind of release that death would mean.

And so, Don sought his sanctuary in the past, in his memories of his brother, in a time when they had been alive and happy and hadn't even realized how lucky they were.


	4. New Insights

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1

* * *

**Chapter 4: New Insights**

"Don!" he was greeted by David. "Are you… Should you be here?"

"This is my job, isn't it?" Don said quietly, avoiding his co-worker's eyes. He'd briefly considered wearing sunglasses today, but then had decided that wouldn't really reach his goal of convincing his colleagues that he was able to do this, so in the end, he had opted for simply doing without the tears today.

"I'm serious, Don. We can hold the fort for a couple of days. I really think you should take some time off."

"But I didn't ask for your opinion, did I?" Don retorted and hated himself while doing so. Then again, self-hatred was something he was getting quite accustomed to these days.

To tell the truth, he wasn't entirely convinced that going back to the office today had been the right thing to do. On the other hand, the mere thought of having to endure another day in his dead brother's house filled him with such horror that his whole conscious mind was blocked off and all that remained were the weird convolutions of his subconscious mind that were sucking him into that pool of grief, then throwing him back out to those embers of searing pain. Yesterday had been more than enough of that. Here, in the office, his conscious mind was in charge, so the pain seemed more bearable instead of all-consuming. The only price he had to pay was the feeling of guilt, for he knew he shouldn't have left his father alone. He wasn't alone, though. Amita and Larry were there with him, and if Don had needed another reason to flee Charlie's house, it would have been that, for as spacious as the house was, it wasn't big enough to contain the grief of three mourning people, much less of four.

"Let's start the briefing, shall we?"

Before David could say another word, Don started off towards one of the smaller conference rooms, the same one they had used yesterday in fact. A minute later, they were all assembled there to talk about the little progress that had been made since their last, suddenly aborted meeting.

"So..." Colby started a little apprehensively, a character trait that didn't suit him at all. "Our biggest problem still seems to be figuring out what the deal with that code is." He paused for a second. "After what happened yesterday, we obviously couldn't ask Amita or Larry to take a look, so we gave it to our technicians. They said it might take a day or two though before they could start working on that, but still, I don't think we should bother the two of them with that right now."

Don nodded, but was busy with suppressing his emotions.

"I talked to his ex-wife," David continued, "but there wasn't much she could tell us. She didn't know anything about that code or what Bourgeois had been up to generally lately. She said she hadn't spoken to him in over a month. We also checked if maybe she might have had a motive for killing him, but we couldn't find anything, at least not at first glance."

Don nodded again. "Anything else?"

"Not much," Colby said. "We talked to his neighbors, but nobody saw or heard anything. There are still a couple of neighbors that weren't home yesterday, so we were planning on going back there this morning to see if we can find them today."

"Alright, you should do that. Megan and I will take a closer look at his job. Maybe his co-workers know something about that code."

With that, the meeting was concluded and Don went back to his desk, mainly to be alone. He hadn't really anticipated how difficult and exhausting it would be for him to be with other people and uphold a professional manner. On the other hand, he didn't think it would have been much easier for him if he'd stayed at home. The pain wasn't going to simply stop, one way or the other.

He logged into his computer in order to deal with the paperwork that had accumulated on his desk yesterday before he and Megan would go to Bourgeois's former working place. To tell the truth, he was dreading the task. He wasn't sure how he was going to take talking to people who had just lost a friend.

He heard Megan come up close behind him and suppressed a sigh. He had a feeling she was going to talk to him, to try and fix him somehow.

He wasn't wrong. "Are you sure you want to do that?" she asked. "Talking to his coworkers, I mean?"

"Why shouldn't I?" Don asked dismissively. At bottom, however, he was actually interested in what Megan might reply to that. He knew he didn't feel at ease at the prospect of going out there and talking to people. He just didn't know why.

"For the same reason why you probably shouldn't have come here today. You're mourning, Don, and that's what you should be doing. You should take your time to come to terms with your loss."

Don clenched his jaw and tried to control his facial expressions. He forced himself to utter a derisive laugh, but had to find that it didn't sound very convincing. "You make it sound so easy. I'll just mourn for a while and then everything will be fine."

To give her credit, Megan's voice was still calm and didn't show whether or not she had been hurt by his words. "I didn't say it was easy. I just don't think you're making things easier for you by forcing yourself to function again and denying yourself any relief or break."

Don was silent and instead of answering checked the inbox of his email program. Just as he was trying to think of a retort, all his thinking was stopped cold. He sat up straight, as if electrified. There was a new email in his inbox, and it had been sent to him yesterday, at about the same time when he had gotten the call from his dad, and that was what didn't make any sense, this was the error that Don had been waiting for ever since he had learned about his brother's death. If he had received this email at a time when Charlie had already been dead, then how come that Charlie had been the one to send it to him?

"Megan," he said flatly as his cursor was hovering over the line that stated the impossible.

He could feel her peering over his shoulder. "Open it," she said and he could hear the tension in her voice. He didn't know why he needed her invitation to bend his finger and click on that line, but he had a feeling that his hesitation might stem from his fear of hallucinating.

The finger bent and the email was opened, just a few lines of black on glaring white.

_Don,_

_this is a safety measure. If something happens to me tonight, this e-mail will be sent to you tomorrow morning when you get into your office. So the fact that you're reading this means that I'm either in serious trouble or dead. In either of those cases, please contact Robert Thompkins from the NSA, case ID: 081958-DXA-15, and also tell him about the murder victim you found yesterday. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you about this earlier. And please, Don, whatever you do, be careful._

_Love  
__Charlie_

Don stared at the black letters and tried to stop the despair that was sucking his entire self into an endless abyss. For a few valuable seconds, he had felt hope, he had thought that there was a chance that maybe, despite everything, Charlie wasn't dead, because dead brothers couldn't write emails. The realization that the email had simply been staggered had violently smashed his hope into sharp pieces that were ripping open the barely healed wounds on his inside. Still, he couldn't stop himself from reading his brother's words over and over again while he felt his team members gather behind his chair.

"He was scared," Don heard himself say after the sixth time he'd read his message, remembering his brother's nervousness the last time he'd seen him. He hadn't thought anything of it then, Charlie often tended to act nervously when he was stressed or among people he didn't know. But now, in hindsight, when he was reading this email, he wondered why he hadn't realized sooner that in truth, Charlie had been afraid of something, and apparently, he had been right in doing so.

He could feel an uncomfortable tingling in every fiber of his body. Charlie had written this email as a safety measure, he'd been afraid for his life, and few hours later, he had been dead. Don didn't need a lecture on mathematical probability to realize that the chances for Charlie's car accident having been an _accident_ had drastically fallen just now.

While his mind was still reeling with the implications of Charlie's message, going its own convoluted paths without being able to focus on anything, his gaze lingered on the last words his brother had written. _Love, Charlie. _He blinked and felt his lips twitching. He still had trouble understanding the situation, he still couldn't fully grasp what was going on here, but that line he understood. Charlie might have said that this was merely a safety measure, only to be sent if something happened to him, that there was only a slim chance Don would ever read this text. On the other hand, he'd been convinced enough that this was serious to make sure, convinced enough to say good-bye to him.

He looked up at his team members, seeking answers to the questions whirling through his mind. "Why didn't he tell me?"

"He probably couldn't," David said and Don shuddered when he saw the grim expression on his face. "If this has something to do with the NSA, he probably wasn't allowed to. You know, 'Never Say Anything' and all that. And I don't know about you, but I think it just got a whole lot more likely that someone tampered with Charlie's car, and whoever it was, they're gonna pay for it." He let the words hang in the silence for a moment, but nobody objected to them. "Maybe Thompkins will be able to help us uncover the truth."

Don nodded, still having difficulty accepting their new theory. Thinking that Charlie's accident might not have been an accident… The thought sent shivers down his spine. It was painful enough to know that his brother was never going to come back to them, but it was hardly bearable to imagine that Charlie's life might have been cut short because someone else had been operating the scissors. Deep down, however, he felt that the additional pain caused by that was fueling primitive emotions like rage and vindictiveness that were giving him something to do, providing him with new energy. Right now, his hatred towards whoever had caused all this was still simmering, still being suffocated by that depressing grief, but the feeling had been awakened, the seed of needing to seek justice for his brother sown.

The problem was: how were they going to get to the bottom of this matter if it had something to do with the NSA? For despite David's optimistic words, Don didn't want to bring his hopes up, he doubted that the NSA's director would risk the leak of information just to help them out on an unresolved death. Even if he went to the trouble of checking the case file Charlie had mentioned, he'd hardly fill Don and his team in on what was going on underneath, not going by Don's experience with the NSA. Still, he at least had to try, for Charlie's sake.

His fears were consolidated when he called Thompkins' office and was fobbed off by his secretary. Therefore, he was all the more surprised when not even half an hour later, his phone rang and a calm, deep voice introduced himself as Robert Thompkins, Director of the NSA.

"Mr. Thompkins," Don said, flustered that the busy man was actually taking the time to deal with his request. "Thank you for calling me back, Sir."

His words had managed to draw his team's attention towards him and he stood, suddenly uncomfortable with all the people in the bullpen. "Could you please wait for a moment, I'm going to redirect your call to the phone in the conference room, where it won't be so crowded."

That he did before he led his team into said conference room and hit the speaker button.

He took a deep breath, then said, "Thanks again for getting back to me so quickly. This whole affair is rather..." He didn't find a word that could describe what was going on with all its grotesque and agonizing features, so he left the phrase unfinished. "I called you on behalf of my brother, Charlie Eppes, he's been working as a consultant for your agency."

"I'm aware of that," the soft voice resounded in the room. "My deepest condolences to you."

Don frowned. "You know what happened?"

"If my info is correct, he died in a car accident early yesterday morning." There was a short pause. "I'm going to be honest with you, Agent Eppes, I was very saddened to hear the news. It's true that Charlie and I had our differences, but we got along quite well on a personal level, so I think I can understand the loss you're feeling. So if there's anything I can help you with, all you need to do is ask."

Don swallowed down the emotions forming a lump in his throat and pulled himself together. "Thank you, Sir." Despite everything, he hesitated, still not feeling at ease to ask for a favor, much less of such a powerful man as Thompkins. On the other hand, he could hardly ignore Charlie's dying wish. "In fact, there is something you could do for me. For Charlie, actually. He, uh… he left me a note saying that I should contact you."

Don waited, but all Thompkins said was "I'm listening," so he dared going on with his request, still not sure what to think about the fact that Charlie had indeed had such personal relations with such a powerful man as the director.

"He mentioned a case file, 081958-DXA-15, and if I understand him correctly, he thought that this case had something to do with a homicide investigation we started the day before yesterday." Don hesitated again, but only briefly. He'd been meaning to wait for Thompkins to give his view on the matter first, to do his share and give him some information as well before Don would play all his cards, but in the end, he couldn't hold back any longer. "I think that my brother was onto something," he said. "He was scared for his life and I'm thinking… I'm thinking that whatever he figured out might have something to do with his… his death."

He pressed his lips together, waiting. He knew that he was sounding a lot like a conspiracist. To tell the truth, he was feeling a lot like one, too, and he didn't know where to stand in this matter. On the one hand, he wanted to give his brother justice and he also realized that the email Charlie had sent to him, the puzzle he had given him to solve, was like fuel that kept his motor running. On the other hand, he felt like he couldn't do this. Talking about his dead little brother, retracing the last steps he had made in this world, was so painful that Don felt like his chest was torn wide open with his heart bleeding drop by drop, with each drop wrenched from the broken organ by a knife someone kept twisting around.

"I see," Thompkins said eventually and Don forced himself to direct his focus back at their conversation. "Let me ask you something about that accident, was there anything pointing to foul play?"

"Nothing has been found yet," Don admitted. "The electronics and the breaks seemed to be working, and also the tires were in order. His car was found at a hazardous bend, and Charlie does tend to drive a little too swiftly. So it's all adding up, it's just that… he was really scared of something."

"Was there anything missing? His laptop, or maybe his cell-phone?"

"As far as we can tell, nothing. It looks like he just got into his car at CalSci after work as he usually did with every intention to drive home, only that he missed the bend."

There was some silence at the other end, and Don made use of the recess in the conversation by collecting himself. Repeating the details of Charlie's death was more painful to him than he'd anticipated, and he was massaging the bridge of his nose in order to level himself and focus on the cold, hard facts.

"Let's leave that for now," Thompkins eventually decided. "Would you mind telling me about your case?"

"Well, as I said earlier, it's a homicide investigation," Don started, but found that he had trouble concentrating. Neither was he sure how much he was supposed to tell Thompkins. "There was a murder victim, male, and we started the investigation the day before yesterday. It was..."

He stopped and looked at his team members for support. True, he was the lead agent, technically it was his decision what to tell Thompkins and what to leave out. Frankly, however, he didn't feel competent to decide that right now, he just knew he wasn't feeling at ease about showing Thompkins all their cards without getting anything in return. The problem was that he didn't trust his own judgment right now.

"With all due respect, Sir," Colby stepped in at his boss's silent request, "I think you should tell us first what you know about this matter and why you think that Charlie wanted us to inform you about this case and what link he might have seen to the NSA case file he mentioned."

In effect, they knew that they didn't have the power of making any demands. The hierarchy was clear and its gradient steep. Besides, as director of _the _intelligence service of the States, their negotiating partner was sure to get the information he sought one way or another anyway.

Therefore, they weren't surprised little when he didn't tell them off immediately. "Who else can hear us?" he asked instead.

"Just the members of my team," Don answered. "Special agents Megan Reeves, David Sinclair and Colby Granger. We're in a secure room and our phoning devices are safe as well."

There was a soft chuckle at the other end and the FBI agents frowned at each other. "Now there's the rub, isn't it?" Thompkins gave a deep sigh and there was nothing left of a chuckle in his voice when he went on, only graveness. "Alright then. I think it goes without saying that what you're about to hear stays strictly between us, although to tell you the truth, I can't even give you a full guarantee for the communication being secure on my end. And that's exactly the point, the telecommunication within our offices was the reason for Charlie to be concerned about our security system. You need to know that a couple of weeks ago, he made some enhancements of our system to make the communication over the phones within and out of the office more secure. I don't know why, but for some reason he thought that the work he'd been doing then had been compromised."

"He told you that?" Colby asked.

"He wrote me an email two days ago stating that, to me and to the agent that had been assigned with the telecommunication problem last month. Unfortunately, however, I only read the email the next morning. When I couldn't reach Charlie, I made some inquiries and learned about his death." He hesitated for a moment, then went on, "I have to admit, the timing of his accident made me suspicious and I was planning to look into the matter as soon as your people would have closed the investigation, but I guess working together with you is the more rational solution."

The FBI agents looked at each other with raised eye-brows. It didn't happen every day that the NSA director suggested working together with you.

"So I think it is relatively obvious," Thompkins continued, "that Charlie found a connection between your murder victim and the communication problem he worked on for us last month, since that's the assignment that belongs to the case file he mentioned in his email to you. Besides, in his email to me he requested permission to fill you in about the telecommunication assignment because he thought it would help you in your homicide investigation, so I guess we can assume the two are connected. So tell me about it, who was the victim? Why do you think Charlie saw a connection there?"

The agents exchanged a glance and silently agreed to share their information now that Thompkins had been so open about the NSA matter. Having an ally in his position in figuring out Charlie's last steps was an advantage not to be scoffed at.

David gave him a summary of the case details as far as Charlie had learned them, and when he was finished, Colby added, "Charlie left pretty suddenly after he'd learned that the victim had been working at a telecommunications company, so there's a connection to the assignment with the NSA, and maybe he found something else on the code to make him suspicious."

"I see," Thompkins said. "Would it be possible for you to send me that code, at least parts of it?"

The four agents exchanged a glance and each one gave a slight nod to show that they agreed on this matter. "We can do that," David said and Thompkins gave them the email address they should send it to.

"What about the other agent?" David then asked while Megan was sending the second page of the transcript they had given Charlie to the NSA director. "Maybe Charlie told him more about this matter? Have you been in contact with him?"

"He's on vacation," Thompkins replied in his forthcoming manner. "I called him when I learned about Charlie's death, but he didn't know anything, he hadn't even read his email before that. Ah yes," he then said, "I received your email. Just give me a minute to check if my hunch is correct."

It was exactly 49 seconds later when he came back to them. "Alright, I think this is close enough. I'm not an expert on these things, but I have compared most of what's on that page you sent me with the code in our file, and I'd say they're identical. That means that the code that Charlie wrote for us in order to enhance our telecommunication security was the same code that turned up with your murder victim, and I can assure you, that man was not supposed to have this code. This has to be the security breach that Charlie was talking about, someone leaked the code he had written, and chances are that this someone is to be found within the NSA. So what we should try and find out now are one, who leaked that code, and two, is that same individual responsible for Charlie's death. For the second question, I think we should wait for the final report of forensics on Charlie's car, and for the first question, I'm going to have a talk with your director. Given that you already have as much information as you do and that it would obviously not be a wise decision to trust my own agents in this matter, we'll figure out whether we'll let NSA's internal affairs handle this matter or… outside forces. In the meanwhile, I suggest you try solving your homicide by looking for suspects that may have had an interest in gaining access to that code."

They had nothing to object or add to that, so with that, the conversation was ended. It left the four agents with a sense of having stumbled into something that was far bigger than they would have thought when they had started the investigation. At the same time, none of them could shake the thought that this whole affair, as powerful as that code might be, seemed too insignificant for being the reason that Charlie had lost his life.


	5. Each Other's Back

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1

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**Chapter 5: Each Other's Back**

David was feeling exhausted when he returned to his cubicle, and that meant something given that he was returning from his lunch break. He'd thought that now that they knew that something was off, now that they had something to do, he would win his energy back. However, he'd had to find that his hopes had been wrong.

But granted, having something to do had also resulted in a less than restful lunch break, since Don, Megan and he had gone to CalSci to see if they could find another clue, if maybe Charlie had figured out something else about what exactly was going on within the NSA and who was involved. Yet again, David figured that his lack of energy was caused less by the fact that they'd had their lunch on the way, but rather by the fact that they hadn't found anything in Charlie's office.

And Colby didn't seem to be doing any better. He was reading in a file and was supporting his head in his hands as though it had become too heavy for his neck alone. True, it might have been nothing more but food coma, but given that Colby had refused to go to lunch with them saying he wanted to check something in the report of Charlie's car and would just grab a quick bite later, that solution didn't seem all that likely.

"Hey," David greeted him, "sorry that took so long, we made a stop at CalSci, didn't find anything though. Have you been back for long?"

When Colby remained silent, David drew his eye-brows together. He craned his neck to look above his partner's shoulder and frowned. Colby was still immersed in the forensics' report "You did have lunch, didn't you?"

"Not yet," Colby mumbled, never looking up from the report.

David briefly closed his eyes and sighed. "Look, I knew it would be a challenge to get Don to eat something, but to be honest, I didn't think we'd have to take care of you as well."

With an exasperated and irritated sigh, Colby forcefully put the file back on the desk. "Did I ask you to take care of me? No, so how about you mind your own business, alright?"

David opened his mouth and was about to make it clear to his friend that this was not the way their communication was working, but he didn't immediately find a way to say it with the right amount of sting, and once the first blow of his partner's words had vaporized without leaving a mark, he thought better than to continue the aggression. They were all emotionally stressed and tense these days, they needed to cut each other some slack.

Therefore, he took a deep breath and waited for another three seconds, counting them off in his head, before he quietly asked, "Did you find anything in the report that might help us?"

Colby threw the file he'd taken up again on the desk and slammed his hand on it for good measure. "No damn it, and I won't find anything if you keep interrupting me!"

"Whoa, calm it down, man! I only wanted to help! We all want to catch these guys, don't we?"

"Do we?" Colby asked with a voice that was dangerously low. He was standing now and had come up so close to David's face that the gesture was almost menacing. "So that's what you think this is about, right, catching the bad guys. You think this is just some other case where we cuff them in the end and go home to celebrate?"

David was shaking his head. "What's your problem, man?"

"My problem? My problem is that we just lost one of our own, and you don't seem to care a shit about that!"

David's mouth was hanging open. "You know that's not true. Charlie was my friend, just like yours –"

Colby gave a laugh at that, although at second thought, it didn't sound too different from crying either. "My friend, yeah? And what makes you think that?"

David stared at him as though he could detect any outward signs that something in Colby's head had been broken recently. This was starting to scare him. "Colby, I swear to G-d, I have no idea what you're talking about, so anytime you wanna include me in what the hell is going on in that head of yours, I'm standing right here."

Colby gave another irritable sigh at that and started pacing the small cubicle, giving the leg of his desk a little kick whenever he passed it. "Okay, what do we know?" he asked, and even though David couldn't miss the irritation in his voice, he was glad that at least his friend had stopped yelling.

He shrugged, unsure what Colby was getting at. "We know that Charlie was found dead in his burnt-out car," he started.

"We know he was scared," Colby took over, obviously not content with David's way of summarizing the facts. "We know he was nervous at the crime scene and we know he thought he was in danger, since he wrote that email to Don. And we can assume that he had already written that email to Don or at least was planning to when I dropped off those transcripts of the code at his office."

"Yeah, okay," David said, still wondering what Colby's point was.

Colby snatched up a picture from the report and came up close to him. "We know that when I dropped off those transcripts, he was scared for his life, and we know that few hours later, he was dead." As he was hissing the words, he was shoving the picture into David's face, the picture of Charlie's burnt-out car.

David swallowed and tore his eyes away from the picture and back to his partner. He shuddered seeing the grim look on his face. "What are you saying?"

Colby took down the picture then, though never breaking eye-contact with him. "You don't get it, do you? I was probably the last person to talk to Charlie. I should have realized what was going on with him and what the deal was with that code. And if I had, we might not be having this discussion, because Charlie might still be with us now."

David stared at his partner and shook his head, his mouth hanging open. "You're not serious, are you? How were you supposed to –"

"I could see how nervous he was! He was absent-minded and agitated, but really quiet at the same time, I don't think he said more than a dozen words while I was there! If I had just asked him what he was so afraid of –"

"If you had asked him," David interrupted him, "he probably wouldn't have told you anyway, given how secretive he was about this. You have to stop beating yourself up about this, man. Second-guessing yourself won't bring him back."

Colby finally broke eye-contact with him then, but the tense muscles around his jaw told David that he hadn't managed to convince his friend. He sighed. It wasn't like he couldn't empathize with Colby's reasoning, but that didn't change the fact that he had no responsibility for what had happened. The question was how long it would take him to accept that, if ever he would.

"I'm sorry," they were suddenly interrupted by a man in a dark suit. He was tall, dark-haired and obviously of Asian descent. David had hardly set eyes upon him when his alarm bells started ringing. _He's NSA_, his gut told him, and he never even came to question that assessment. The suit, the posture, the non-descript face, the fierce look in those eyes, it all fit.

"I was told you could tell me where to find Agent Eppes," the NSA agent said and David's alarm bells were going crazy.

"What do you want from him?" he asked and had stopped caring about his manners completely.

"That's something I will tell him and nobody else, if you don't mind. This is a somehow personal matter."

"Look, Agent Eppes is rather busy today, so if you have something to say, just say it to us and we'll make sure he'll get your message," Colby said and was apparently as eager as David to protect Don from anyone with affiliations to the NSA. Given what they knew, it was almost certain that someone from within the NSA was responsible for the security breach and hence also responsible for Charlie's death, and that made the NSA their enemy.

"Alright, now listen to me, this is important," the agent said. His voice was still calm, but the look in his eyes showed that he was slowly losing his patience. "I know that he's grieving for his brother, and that's why I'm here. I think I have some news that he'd like to hear."

David and Colby exchanged a look. True, the NSA was their new enemy, but they were also their most promising source of information when it came to investigating Charlie's death.

"Alright, follow us," David eventually said and led their guest to the small conference room they had held their briefing in and to which Don and Megan had retreated to take a look at Bourgeois's co-workers. Since the small room wasn't needed anyway, Don had preferred its isolation to the crowded bullpen.

The two of them looked up in surprise when the three newcomers entered the room.

"Agent Eppes," the NSA guy said before David or Colby could step in and shook Don's hand, who had risen from his seat, "pleased to meet you. I'm Agent Taro Nakamura from the NSA, I worked with your brother Charlie."

They all could see how Don's face hardened at that and neither did they miss that he quickly withdrew his hand from the agent's grip.

"What do you want?" he asked and the hatred was almost palpable in his voice.

"Okay, what is this?" Nakamura said, looking from one to the other. "I mean I know this is a very difficult time for you all, but do you mind explaining to me why you're acting as though I'm the devil himself?"

"Tell us what you want here first," Colby called on him.

The agent gave him a silent stare and then shrugged his shoulders. "Alright," he said, but there was still a healthy amount of irritation in his voice. Before he continued, he wended out of the half-circle the federal agents had formed around him and took a seat at the far end of the table, from where he could see them all. "I merely came here because I thought you might be interested in knowing that there's a good chance that Professor Eppes's death was not an accident."

"We already know that," David stepped in. "And we also have a pretty good idea where to look for suspects."

Nakamura raised his eye-brows and his lip twitched to something like a one-sided smile. "So that's where all this hatred is coming from." The smile vanished in an instant. "How do you know? Did Charlie tell you something?"

"I really don't think this is any of your business," Colby stated, his arms crossed before his chest.

"Well, I do," Nakamura said and stood. "Charlie sent me an email before he died, saying he was concerned about… something."

"We know," Colby said. "But why would you come here and tell us that? Shouldn't you just go to your bosses and sort it out with them?"

"Look, I worked pretty closely with Charlie. From what he told me about you, Agent Eppes, I thought that you would want to find whoever is responsible for his death. The way he talked about you, I figured I could trust you, and that's not something I can say as easily with respect to my superiors."

That gave the agent four pairs of raised eye-brows, so he felt the need to add, "Look, do I suspect someone of them? Of course not. But the fact is that Charlie figured something out and died shortly after informing the NSA, so I guess we all agree that it was someone from the inside that killed him, and I think it's too early to rule anyone out."

The FBI agents were silent for a while. "Exactly," Don's voice then floated over from the corner he was sitting in. "So again, what are you doing here? You want to check on the progress we're making?"

"I told you. I worked with Charlie. To be exact, I was the agent in charge for the assignment that got him into this mess, so part of my job was to make sure that one, Charlie could work on his assignment safely, and two, nothing of his work was getting on the outside, and neither seems to have gone very well. So that's why I'm here, it was my job to have Charlie's back, and in a way it still is."

"Well, there's a knife in that back now," Don said in a tone that was disturbingly quiet. "You wouldn't happen to know who put it there? Would have to be someone who knew what was going on, wouldn't you say so? Which seems to leave us with Thompkins, and you."

"You really think I had something to do with this?" Nakamura's show of indignation was fairly convincing. "Alright, so go ahead, check me out! And once you're done with that, maybe we can finally start looking for who really did this to him."

Don's voice was still quiet, almost indifferent, but David could see that the tension in his body had increased, that it was getting harder for him to maintain this facade of calmness. "So you want to stick to your story, that you're feeling responsible for what happened and now want to go against your employer single-handedly?" He shook his head and it seemed as though he was going for a pitiful smile. "You don't actually expect us to believe that, do you? That you'd just show up here unannounced without having an ulterior motive? Besides, we were told you were on vacation."

"I just told you, I was responsible for this case, and for Charlie. Do you really expect me to lie on the beach and relax after what happened?" Nakamura sighed and took a moment to collect himself. They waited, for they could see the wheels turn behind his forehead. "Okay, so you don't trust me, I'm starting to get that. I guess I can hardly blame you for that. But Charlie trusted me. He informed me about the leak."

"So what?" Don asked, still eerily calm.

"So, if Charlie trusted me, maybe you should trust your brother's judgment and trust me too."

"Well, my brother's dead, so I don't know if trusting his judgment is such a good piece of advice."

"Look –"

"This meeting is over now," Don said and stood. "You can see yourself out," he added as he pushed open the door and swiftly strode to the men's room.


	6. The Enemy Within

**Disclaimer: **see chapter 1

* * *

**Chapter 6: The Enemy Within**

The cool liquid on his hot face was giving him some kind of relief, as though it could numb the thoughts that were relentlessly agonizing him behind his forehead. He savored the numbness for a while as he stood there above the sink and let the water dribble from his nose and chin. Then he looked up and couldn't stop himself from shrinking back when he was confronted with that drained, ghost-like face staring back at him. As he eyed his reflection, he was torn between being repelled by that ugly creature and feeling pity for its deplorable state. In the end, however, all he could really feel despite the numbness was grief.

He sighed heavily. Apparently, this wasn't going to go away anytime soon. Worse, he had the distinct feeling that conversations like the one he'd just had with Nakamura weren't exactly helping him cope with his brother's death, at least not in a healthy manner. Merely talking about Charlie was like ripping off a piece of his soul every time he mentioned his name, but speculating about how he had come to die was a hundred times worse. Poking around in this case and wondering what might have led to Charlie's death had to be the hardest thing he'd ever done, and he didn't feel like he'd be able to do that for much longer. Thus, he was tempted to seriously consider whether it wouldn't be better to leave this matter alone and leave Charlie's death for someone else to investigate. On the other hand, how could he do that? He could hardly ignore his brother's dying wish. Charlie had sent him that email for a reason, he'd counted on him to see to it that justice was done to him. Besides, Don could hardly leave this case in the hands of the NSA. True, he felt like trusting Thompkins, but in the end, why should he? That Nakamura fellow didn't, and who was Don to decide that Nakamura was the black sheep and Thompkins the saint and not the other way round?

He groaned, but stifled the sound in the paper towel he used to dry his face. It seemed as though even in death, his brother managed to make his world not only much more interesting, but also a damn lot more complicated.

The door opened and David appeared in it. "Don, the A.D. just came down looking for you, we're now officially investigating these as two linked cases. Or in any case, more or less officially, since we're to operate strictly on a need-to-know basis."

"I'm coming," Don said and tried to mask his pain by his quiet voice. He couldn't help but wonder at how well it was working.

When he and David returned to the small conference room, the tension in the air couldn't be missed.

"What's going on?" Don asked.

"Well, apparently Megan here doesn't think a half-god like that Nakamura fellow or his colleagues should be treated like common people and investigated," Colby said testily.

"I didn't say that!" Megan defended herself. "I just pointed out that we should tread very carefully and not start accusing people at random. We can't put the whole NSA under general suspicion."

"That's exactly what we have to do, because from where we stand, _someone_ from the NSA killed Charlie," Don said and bit his lip. The phrase still didn't come easily to him. Probably never would.

"Yes, _someone_, but not _everyone_. Which also means that it might come in very handy to have _some_ people at the NSA work together with us."

"_Some _people like Nakamura?" Colby asked. "What's with you and that fellow, you dig the guy or what?"

Despite the fire in her eyes, Megan's voice was ice cold. "I'm with Larry, in case you forgot. But yes, I think he might be able to help us."

"He might also be the one who's responsible for Charlie's death," Colby shot back. "Or have you already forgotten that he and Thompkins are the only ones who knew that Charlie was onto something?"

"We don't know that," Megan argued. "We don't know if Charlie told someone else, or if someone else had found out somehow. We don't even know whether his poking around was the reason that somebody wanted him dead, maybe someone was trying to kill off everyone connected to the code, that would also explain Bourgeois's murder. And even if either Nakamura or Thompkins are dirty, we still don't know which one is."

"The problem is that we can't trust _anyone_ within the NSA," David entered the discussion.

"Not before we've investigated them," Megan said. "But why shouldn't we talk to Nakamura again, check his background and _then_ decide whether or not we can trust him?"

"Because he's NSA!" Colby snapped. "You really wanna team up with the guys who killed Charlie?"

"And how are we supposed to figure out anything without an ally within the NSA?" Megan shot back.

"Alright, stop it," Don ended their fight. He was getting a head-ache from their quarrels, and he didn't feel like they were getting anywhere with this. "We're going to start with investigating Nakamura. I still don't like how he just came up here to spy on us. In case he should check out, we can still think about whether or not we want to ask for his assistance on checking out his coworkers."

"So how do we proceed?" David asked, always the pragmatist.

"Well, he said himself we can check him out, right?" Colby said with still a healthy amount of pugnacity in his voice. "We just call him back and interrogate him while we gather as much background information about him as we can."

Don nodded. "You do that. Find his contact information." He grimaced. "We should have thought of this earlier, when we still had him here. This way it might take us hours to get a hold –"

"I have his contact information," Megan interrupted him quietly.

When her three colleagues stared at her, she went on, "I went after him when you threw him out and asked him to give them to me in case we had further questions."

Don raised his eye-brows. "Good thinking," he praised her. _And exactly what you should have done_, he told himself. Asking for contact information was a crucial step when talking to a witness, while cutting them off and kicking them out certainly wasn't.

* * *

Since Nakamura had still been in the area, it didn't take long until he was back in their office. This time, however, David and Colby didn't lead him into the conference room, but into an interrogation room.

"What is this?" Nakamura asked with some indignation. "You said you wanted my help."

That was true. Colby had made the call, and he hadn't taken the chance of Nakamura escaping from them by revealing to him that they didn't need him as some kind of addition to their team, but as a suspect. He wasn't going to take any chances letting this guy run free again. If Nakamura had something to do with Charlie's death, and Colby was getting more convinced that he had by the minute, then they were going to nail him, no matter what it might take. They owed this to Charlie.

"And we do need your help," he said as he pulled back a chair and indicated to Nakamura to come in and sit. "We would very much like to have some information from you."

"Look, I do want to help you find who did this, but –"

"And we'll be very grateful for your further assistance once we know we can trust you," David said and had that look of silent request on his face that it was hard to resist.

For a moment, Nakamura just stared at him as though he was trying to decipher the look in his eyes. "Do I need a lawyer here?" he then asked.

David shrugged and kept his voice both polite and detached, and Colby couldn't help but feel a little awe at his partner's ability to exude calm and efficiency. "Well," he said, "you can call one if you want to, of course. But that would make it a lot harder to keep this little meeting unofficial, and I think that's something that we all want."

Nakamura gave a little chuckle at that, but his face soon hardened again as he stared ahead of him in deep thought. "Alright," he said eventually and stepped in. With a sigh, he sat down on the chair allocated for the suspect and looked up at them with something like a mock smile on his face. However, Colby was watching him closely enough to see that the smile didn't reach his eyes.

"So you're serious about this, aren't you?" Nakamura said. "You really think I had something to do with Charlie's death."

"Well, you've got to put yourself in our shoes," David said as he closed the door and took his stand at the other side of the table, across from their suspect. "This is the NSA we're talking about, so we imagine that there aren't a whole lot of people who knew what Charlie had been working on, or that he had figured out that there was a leak somewhere. You knew both."

"So did Director Thompkins."

"But he's at the East Coast," Colby argued. "You're here."

Nakamura raised his eye-brows. "Did you check whether he actually was in Fort Meade at the time of Charlie's murder? Besides, he might have had someone else do the dirty work for him."

"You know what I think is curious?" David asked as he leaned in closer to the other man. "That you're so quick with pointing the finger at someone else. And even you have to admit that there aren't a whole lot of people you can put the blame on, given that your best shot is Director Thompkins."

"Look, I had nothing to do with Charlie's death, that's all I can tell you."

"Come on, man," Colby said, "If you want us to believe you, you'll at least have to give us some further suspects. So who else knew what Charlie had been working on?"

Nakamura sighed deeply and Colby could almost see the wheels turn behind his forehead. Nakamura clearly wasn't going to go down for this without a fight, but he wasn't willing to give up his co-workers either. Colby wasn't surprised though when in the end, self-preservation won.

"Only my team and the technicians who were responsible for inserting the new code knew," he replied. "You see, all Charlie did was enhance the code that was already there, improve the security by adding some extra algorithms or whatever, I don't really understand this stuff."

"So what exactly was your assignment?" David asked.

Nakamura shrugged. "Nothing much. We just had to make sure Charlie could work safely on that code and that he gained access to everything he needed. We were more like the go-to-guys in case he had a problem. Most of the times, he worked alone while we were busy with other cases."

Colby snorted. Nakamura's story wasn't adding up. "Still you argued earlier that you were something like his confidant."

"Well, he did send me that email, you can check that. He trusted me."

"Yeah well, Charlie trusted about anybody as long as they weren't holding a gun to his head. He sent that email to you because you'd been his boss, but that doesn't mean he had any good reason for trusting you, and neither do we."

Nakamura sighed irritably. "You know what, believe what you want. What is it to you anyway if –"

"Because you lied to us," Colby interrupted him. He had put his hands on the table and was leaning in to their suspect, and he felt his hatred against him grow. "You told us how closely you and Charlie worked together and how well you got along, because you wanted us to believe that all you wanted to do was help us investigate his murder. But in fact you're just trying to cover your ass."

"I did work closely together with Charlie," Nakamura said and Colby thought he could hear a slight snarl in his voice, apparently Nakamura was getting nervous and tried to mask that with anger. "On _earlier_ cases. That's why my team was assigned this task, because he knew us and we knew him. _And_ had gotten along pretty well."

Colby gave a sound that was meant as an incredulous laugh, but came out pretty close to a growl. He was getting sick of Nakamura's claims how well he and Charlie had gotten along when in fact, he'd been the one to kill him. In any case, he felt like Nakamura was somehow offending against a proper sense of reverence to their dead friend.

"I keep thinking," Nakamura said with a show of sorrow that didn't fool Colby for an instant, "that all this might have been prevented if Charlie had just called me."

"He obviously didn't trust the phone lines. Hardly surprising, wouldn't you say?" David remarked.

"Of course I get that, but this way, I didn't learn about what he was up to until it was too late. If I had known that he was looking into this matter, I would have come, he was still my responsibility with regard to this case. He shouldn't have tried to investigate this all on his own, we should have worked on this together, then I could have kept him safe."

"Well," Colby shot back, unaccountably angry about the insinuation that they would have let Charlie investigate on his own, "he wasn't really working alone, he was working the murder case with _us._"

Nakamura lifted his head and looked at him earnestly for a second before he asked, "So why didn't _you_ keep him safe?"

"You son of a bitch," Colby hissed and at the same moment had the guy by his collar. "_You_ don't get to ask that!"

"Colby –" he heard David's warning behind him, but ignored him. He was pressing Nakamura against the wall now, only half aware that he wasn't sure what he was trying to accomplish by that. He wanted him to confess, true, but more than anything else, he wanted him to shut up and stop defiling Charlie's memory.

"You think I don't get what you're trying to do?" Nakamura shot back at him. "You're looking for a scapegoat, you just want to arrest someone just so you won't feel guilty anymore, because you know that you let him down! If you had –"

There was a funny sensation on his knuckles and he realized that he was shouting at that guy to shut up, and the next thing he was really aware of were David's hands that were pulling him away from that worthless scumbag. Now that his field of vision cleared, he could see the blood running from Nakamura's nose and he became aware of how hard he was breathing. He stepped back, looking at what his fist had done to that face, then at the culprit itself. His knuckles were scraped, even bleeding a little, but he couldn't feel the pain, he just felt the anger that was slowly releasing him now, leaving behind the nagging suspicion that he had let his emotions drag him down a road he had never wanted to go.


	7. A Break

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1  
**A/N: **Thank you so much for your comments! Since the question has arisen and this seems like the right time for a reminder: this story is set in in (mid-)season 4.

* * *

**Chapter 7: A Break**

Megan sighed heavily before she let herself fall onto her couch. Her stomach felt pleasantly full, the wine had helped her relax after an exhausting day at work and Larry's company gave her a feeling of warmth and, somehow irrationally, of safety. Still, she would have been lying had she said she was fine.

"You know, I am aware that you too lost a friend with Charles," Larry remarked as he was watching her from the side, and Megan instinctively felt like he was reading her mind. He often seemed to be doing that. "I cannot help but think though that there seems to be more than that preying on your mind."

Megan was silent for a moment and took in his appearance in return. He was pale, she decided, and the dark smudges under his eyes told her that he wasn't getting much sleep these days. Worse than the fatigue though were the lines on his forehead that were deeper than ever. While those lines usually were a sign of deep thinking in various fields ranging from the hard sciences to more spiritual philosophical musings, Megan knew that these days, those lines were an indicator of the deep sorrow that Larry felt about his dead friend and former protégé. She was hesitating to burden him with her problems on top of what he was dealing with, but eventually she realized that she should talk to someone about this, and she couldn't think of anybody more suitable to unburden her heart to than Larry.

"It's work," she sighed and thoughtfully played with the fringes of the woolen blanket she had put over herself and him. "Every time I get home after a long day, I feel like I could use a break of a day or two."

"Well, your job is quite stressful," Larry remarked with understanding in his voice. "And I imagine that… recent events haven't been easy on you either, or on the dynamics within your team."

"See, that's the problem," Megan explained. She had sat herself up a little straighter, she was more alert now, more agitated. "I don't feel like we're working together as well as we used to, and I'm not even sure that it's only since Charlie has died, but apparently, I'm the only one having issues with that." She thought for a second. "I guess that's the problem, that it's usually me who's the only one having issues with something, and I don't know how to deal with it anymore. I'm getting tired of it and I keep thinking that maybe I should just back down and try to fit in, but at the same time, I don't want to give in, because I still think that I'm doing the right thing, that we should more often think of the overall consequences of how we conduct ourselves as agents."

She fell silent, but she wasn't done yet. Yes, she knew that she had to keep trying to do the right thing, even when she felt she was tilting at windmills, but on the other hand... "On the other hand, I don't think I can do this for much longer. I just feel so alone on the job. And now with Charlie..."

She let the phrase hang in the air, unwilling to elaborate and instead concentrating on the firm grip of Larry's hand around hers. She smiled, despite everything. "I guess I just miss him. You know, I liked him a lot, but I've always thought him to be a little too idealistic, naive even. But lately I've been thinking that being idealistic and naive might be the better option when to decide on which side to fall off the horse. I mean, of course it would be best to just remain sitting in the saddle and not fall off on either side, but that's what I've come to realize doesn't seem to work for very long."

They were both silent for a while, a thoughtful, yet comfortable silence. Eventually, Larry suggested, "I think the important thing in your job might be not to stop trying to get back into the saddle, if I may use your metaphor. That once you've fallen down on one side, no matter which, you don't stay there, but try to get back to walk the thin line between idealism and pragmatic effectiveness."

"And that's exactly what I think I might no longer have the strength for, not when it seems as though everybody else is standing on the side of pragmatic effectiveness and not even trying to get back on the horse and look at the larger picture."

Larry frowned and seemed to hesitate for a second, but eventually voiced his reservations after all. "And you are certain that the symptoms you are describing are permanent, you don't think this might merely be a reaction to… well, to the personal investment of your current case?"

She sighed. "Maybe. I hope so. On the other hand, what's going on right now is just another symptom of what I've been describing. We shouldn't be investigating Charlie's death, we're far too close to this." She thought back at Colby's interrogation. That should never have happened, and it shouldn't even have been possible for an incident like that to occur. True, Colby had made a mistake, he'd lost his objectivity and had let himself get carried away by his emotions. However, wasn't the real fault lying in the system? What had they thought would happen when they let them investigate their own friend's death? At least Don should have been taken off this case, he'd lost his brother, for Chr-st's sake. And given that his reaction to Colby's behavior during the interrogation had been practically non-existent, it was obvious that he wasn't doing the job he was supposed to do as a team leader, yet nobody seemed to mind. Not that Megan wanted Colby to be punished, yet it felt wrong that he could just do what he did without having to face any consequences.

"I just keep wondering..." Megan continued, but fell silent while she was fighting to get her thoughts in order, trying to decide whether she really wanted to say this. Right now, however, she felt it was the truth. "I keep wondering whether sometimes, we might not be causing more harm than good by what we do, and that wasn't what I signed up for. And now with this case… It seems like Charlie has fallen victim to this job, even though he wasn't really a part of all this, you know what I mean? There are far too many sacrifices involved in this job, and I'm not sure it's worth it anymore, because it doesn't feel our work in real life can't live up to the ideals on paper we signed up for. And I just feel like with every step we take forward in this investigation, I'm losing the trust I had in our legal system and in the state authority."

Larry's frown had become deeper, both with concern and with confusion. "I'm sorry you feel that way. I can only imagine the dilemma it puts you in. But I'm afraid I cannot quite understand how you came to losing the trust you once had."

Megan smiled sadly. "I think it's because I eventually got to know the system. And every day, life just keeps throwing things at it that it can't handle the way I think it should. It feels as though every incident like that is eating away my trust piece by piece, and now all that's left is some kind of fragile, porous something."

"What kind of incidents are you talking about?"

Megan sighed. She wasn't supposed to talk about this to Larry, not as long as he wasn't officially consulting on this case, which she didn't think would be wise given that he was even more biased in this matter than her. Still, she had to talk to someone about this, someone who could understand her, and as sad as it was, Larry seemed to be the only one who fit that criterion. "Just take this case for example. We assumed that Nakamura and Thompkins were the only ones to know about Charlie's suspicions, so we assumed Nakamura was our most promising suspect. So when he wouldn't confess, which he couldn't do if he's innocent, things got… quite heated." She bit her lip. Even though she didn't want to defend Colby's behavior, she didn't want to blab about it either. "What happened in that interrogation room was something that wasn't supposed to happen, especially since we now have reason to believe that Nakamura is indeed innocent."

"How come?"

"We finally got the forensics report, and they said that apparently, we might have been spied upon when we were investigating the crime scene. There'd been a computer in the room where the body had been found, and apparently, its microphone and webcam had been turned on. They say it's likely that someone had been watching us, and whoever that was must have realized that Charlie knew more about this matter than was good for them."

She closed her eyes and laid her head back, feeling exhausted. True, she too had been upset, not only about the news itself, but more importantly that it had taken forensics so long to inform them about that, but she nonetheless felt uneasy when she thought about the furious expressions on the faces of her team members upon hearing the news. Don had been downright yelling at the poor guy from forensics why they hadn't been notified earlier, why this crucial information had only been conveyed to them along with the rest of the report. In the end, Megan was aware that this was simply an oversight made by someone in the forensics unit, it was human error, just like Colby's behavior in the interrogation room had been human error. Still, she couldn't help but wonder how much human error would have been preventable by fixing the system.

"But you don't have any proof that someone from the NSA has been spying on your progress?"

Megan grimaced. "No. It seems like we don't have proof for anything, we just keep making assumptions. We couldn't even find ties between Bourgeois and the NSA. All we know is that since Charlie's assignment, Bourgeois has been called from two numbers belonging to prepaid cellphones, so it's possible there's a link to the NSA there, even likely considering that there have been several calls from one of the two numbers starting last week, right before he bought that notebook he used to examine Charlie's code. But if it wasn't for this code, there wouldn't be any links to the NSA at all."

"But you're convinced that the NSA is somehow involved in this, that this code might be the reason why this man had to die?"

Megan sighed deeply. "Yes… no… I don't know. I just don't know what to think about this," she thought aloud. "I mean, it seems plausible enough that someone from the NSA is behind this, but given everything that's going on right now, I'm not sure whether we might not be getting obsessed with an idea that will ultimately turn out to be wrong, and even if someone from the NSA is behind all this, that still doesn't mean that we should investigate the whole agency. All this is starting to morph into a war between the FBI and the NSA when instead, we should be working together. It just feels like investigating Charlie's death the way we're doing it is eating away at the last supports of a system that is far greater than a single case, and I just don't know whether we shouldn't rather try to fix this system instead of dealing a deathblow to it."

"I believe I can understand your dilemma," Larry said thoughtfully. "I can see that it doesn't make a lot of sense to risk upsetting an order that is serving to protect a whole nation merely for a single case. And it may very well be that now I am the one who's being too idealistic and naive, but… Well, I can't help but think that Charles deserves better than this. I have to admit, I don't know what to think about what I am experiencing, for I've never thought of myself as being a revengeful man, but if I am being honest, I can't tolerate the idea of whoever did this walking free without punishment."

Megan was silent. She had heard this phrase in one variation or other so often today that it was starting to lose its meaning. "And what if there is no such 'whoever'?" she asked quietly.

Larry was eyeing her attentively with a puzzled look on his face. "I fear I'm not sure I understand what you're saying," he said, but she was assured by his willingness to accept her theory as a hypothesis that it was worth discussing. She didn't think she would have gotten the same reaction from her team members.

So she voiced the one question that had been haunting her mind ever since her colleagues had lost themselves in their war against the NSA, "What if it was an accident after all?"

Larry was frowning. "I thought you were sure that it wasn't?"

Megan shook her head. "We still have no evidence. We just assumed that Charlie was killed ever since we knew he felt threatened, and I admit that if someone wanted to silence him, the accident came with a very convenient timing. But on the other hand, if Charlie was nervous, if he was scared, and if he was tired, then I don't think we should rule out that his accident was indeed exactly that, an accident."

"You think you might be looking for a culprit where there is none?"

Megan sighed and felt her throat closing up. She was exhausted, on every level. "I don't know. I mean, we still have Bourgeois's death, but that's exactly it, maybe the NSA didn't have anything to do with it, and yet that's the only lead we've been following. I just don't know what to think anymore. I just… I'm feeling so lost. And whatever I do, I keep thinking: this is wrong. And I know Charlie deserves justice, but then again I don't know whether this is even possible, or necessary, and I'm just so tired of agonizing over these questions. And even though I know it's not fair to him, I just don't want to do this any longer, I don't want to keep thinking about these questions, and I don't want to weigh the bad sides against the worse, and I don't want to keep coming up with theories that support our assumptions and in the process rip apart existences just to see these theories confirmed or dismissed. I keep wondering whether we might not be doing more good by letting things be, by _not_ getting involved, by leaving at least those stones unturned that are forming our foundation." She gave him an afflicted smile. "I guess I can hardly get a scientist's approval for an approach like that."

"Probably not," Larry smiled back, but he too had a sad look in his eyes. "However, even scientists are human beings who understand that searching for the truth may come along with painful investments that make it hard to follow that path. And I… I admire you all for what you've been doing. The idea of having to keep a clear head while dealing with this tragedy… I mean, every time that I think of Charles, I get distracted and quite useless for anything practical. What I'm trying to say is that I can understand how you wouldn't want to speculate about the details of his death anymore, and I think that you shouldn't be so hard on yourself because of that, and that every now and then you might want to allow yourself a break from dealing with those questions. I can't see anything wrong with that."

Megan's smile grew wider while at the same time, the tears crept into her eyes. "Thanks for understanding," she whispered and snuggled up against him where she could just feel and float without the need to think.

* * *

The next morning, Megan returned to the office with a new agenda that was accompanied by fresh energy, for she had found a way to deal with her dilemma. If she couldn't convince her coworkers that their bias might be leading them into a dead end, she would simply follow the other leads they had by herself. True, that way to proceed didn't assuage her feeling of isolation, but that was the poison she would pick.

She had decided to retrace Charlie's steps from the moment he'd last been seen alive to the moment he had been found dead. This way, there was a good chance that she would find out if someone had tampered with his car. And if she didn't find anything… well, then she might at least have raised enough doubt to be able to convince her team members to look into the accident theory as well.

Luckily for her, Charlie had always used to park his car in one of CalSci's parking lots that had security cameras at the boom barriers, and after she had gained access to the video recordings, it didn't take her long to find the point of time when Charlie had entered the parking lot in the afternoon after having visited the crime scene. It gave her heart a stab to see him back to life, but she forced herself to keep her personal feelings aside for the moment and focus on her task.

Now that she was sure that she was examining the right parking lot, she jumped to the time frame when, according to the approximate time of the accident, Charlie must have left CalSci, and skipped through the footage. She frowned when she had reached 5 am, the latest time of his death, and went back to her starting point of 3:30 am to go through the recording once more, with smaller increments this time, so that she could be sure not to miss anything. Charlie however, was still nowhere to be seen.

So then, she started at 3:30 and went backwards. Maybe Charlie had made a stop somewhere before going home? Even though Megan had some difficulty imagining where he could have gone in the middle of the night and still have had his accident between CalSci and his home.

She didn't have to search for long. At shortly past 3:00 am, Charlie's blue Prius came into sight and she slowed down then to make sure it was really his car. Then she gasped. This certainly wasn't Charlie.

She felt that her hands had started shaking. If she could still trust her eyes, then their theory that someone had tampered with Charlie's car to cause an accident had apparently not been bold enough. Right now, it seemed as though the killers had chosen a more bulletproof way to eliminate their victim, because apparently Charlie had already been attacked at CalSci. She tried to get a good look at the backseat to figure out whether they had disposed of Charlie there, but neither the angle nor the image quality allowed for that. Maybe, however, it was better if she couldn't see that much of the car's interior, because the mere thought of spotting Charlie's corpse just lying there made her sick, despite all her experience on this gruesome job.

She noticed that her heartbeat had quickened as she searched for a frame that would show her the driver a little better. She soon realized that there was not much use of that, though: not only was he – or was it a she? That too seemed possible – wearing a baseball-cap, but he had also pulled a mask over his face, probably nylon or something of the kind. In short, he was unrecognizable.

She paused. Wasn't it possible… couldn't the driver be Charlie after all? True, she couldn't see how that would fit the chain of events, but since the disguise of the driver was so perfect, it was still a possibility. Still, something inside her revolted against the thought. It didn't fit, although it took her a few moments to put her finger on those small details. When she had, however, there was no doubt left in her mind: she still couldn't tell for sure whether this person was a man or a woman with a masculine built, but she was positive that it wasn't Charlie. The posture didn't fit him, and besides, the driver seemed to be taller than him. Then, there was his hair. Even with the disguise, the mass of curls should have been recognizable somehow under the baseball cap, but it wasn't. No, this was someone else driving his car, and given that only few hours later, Charlie's dead body had been found in that car and no other body aside from that, it was now clearer than ever that they were dealing not with an accident, but with something much more premeditated.

She shuddered when another thought occurred to her. Until now, she had assumed that Charlie had been incapacitated somehow, put in the trunk of his car and then sat behind the steering-wheel unconscious before it had been launched down the slope. Now, however, she wondered if that was the only logical chain of events. Wasn't it possible, even probable, that Charlie had already been dead at this point, when his car had left CalSci's parking lot? It seemed the safer and easier solution from the killer's point of view. In any case, they would need a full autopsy on Charlie now. Megan shuddered again when she realized what that would mean. Over the course of her career, she had seen her fair share of dissected corpses, and she became sick when she thought of Charlie lying there on the dissection table. On the other hand, she also became sick thinking of him as a corpse, a burn victim no less.

Her hand was reaching out toward the phone to make the necessary calls to start the autopsy, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She knew she had enough probable cause for this step, enough to override the wishes of the victim's family, but that didn't change anything about the fact that she had to talk to Don about this first.

* * *

"An autopsy?" David asked while Don was staring hard at the desk in front of him. She could easily tell that the new information had hit him hard.

Megan just nodded as an answer to David and let her eyes convey how important she thought this step was. When she exchanged glances with him and Colby, she could see that they too were on her side, but given the facts, that was hardly surprising. What she was really waiting for was an 'okay' from Don.

"Do it," he said quietly.

She had a feeling he wasn't finished yet though, so she waited.

"We should have done this already," he continued. His voice was somber, even desolate, and Megan winced at seeing the look of guilt on her boss's face. "Ever since we got Charlie's email, it was clear that either someone tampered with his car or did something to him first before staging the accident. We shouldn't have stopped at examining only his car for signs of foul play."

"I'll make the necessary calls then," Megan said and left the room. Granted, she found it difficult to see how hard a time Don was giving himself, but she forced herself to focus on the fact that they were finally making some progress and, with a little luck, would soon know how Charlie had come to die, which would bring them one step closer to figuring out who was responsible for his death.


	8. Paradigm Shifts

**Disclaimer: **see chapter 1  
**Edit (23rd August):** Thanks a lot to hengrimm for pointing out two little inconsistencies! I made some correlating changes in chapters 7 and 8.

* * *

**Chapter 8: Paradigm Shifts**

"Anything?" David asked when he returned to their cubicle.

"Nothing," Colby grumbled. "Nakamura's good at hiding his tracks."

David bit his lip, but eventually said it anyway, "Or innocent."

Colby gave him a look that David guessed should have been glaring, but there was too much insecurity in the depths of his eyes as if it could have conveyed this message. "You really think so?"

David shrugged a little uneasily. At the beginning of their investigation, he too had been convinced that Nakamura was dirty, but the complete lack of evidence or merely signs in that direction was something that could no longer be ignored nor reasoned away. "I just can't imagine how he would have pulled this thing off without leaving anything behind," he said. "We checked his movements and know that he couldn't have been anywhere near Charlie at the time of his death, and neither has his cell phone been in the same cell tower areas as the prepaid cellphones Bourgeois received calls from. There's no abnormal activity on his bank accounts, his phone records or his browser history, and neither could we find any unusual or even suspicious circumstances in the cases he worked. His whole story checks out, not a single inconsistency. I don't like saying it, but he checks out, man, on every level. I guess he might really just have felt responsible for this case to make him show up here."

Colby gave a deep sigh and leaned back in his office chair. "Shit," he cursed softly.

David hesitated a moment, but then decided that it was essentially a good thing, even if it put Colby in Nakamura's debt. "He seems to be on our side, despite everything. Maybe that's why he didn't press charges against you for assaulting him, for he certainly could have." Or at least he hadn't pressed charges yet. Luckily though he hadn't been hurt badly in yesterday's altercation, all he had gotten was a bruised face.

"Lucky me," Colby replied gloomily before he turned his back on him again.

David bit his lip. Given what his partner had confided to him yesterday, about his feelings of guilt, he didn't think he liked what he was seeing, and Colby's assault on Nakamura was just the tip of the iceberg.

"Are you okay?" he asked in so low a voice that they couldn't be heard by the other agents in the bullpen.

"Sure I am," Colby replied, pretending to be busy with the report in front of him. When David stayed silent though, he swiveled his office chair to face him and deal with this in a more direct manner. "Come on, don't look at me like that. I know I was out of line, okay? I just… I don't know." He half-turned back to his report, but David could still see his eyes and the sadness in them. "This is all so messed up."

David could feel a lump in his throat. Colby was right about that. David had thought that if they just continued as usual, it would be easier to get over the loss, but he had to realize that this was still hitting him a lot harder than he would have expected. Charlie had been part of this team ever since David had been, and now thinking that he was not simply gone, but gone for good… It was hard to accept that.

And it didn't get easier by watching Don struggle with this situation. True, on the outside Don pretended to be functioning as though he was coping pretty well with Charlie's death. He probably didn't know that he didn't fool anyone by this show of professionalism. David had noticed that most times, Don was trying to block the memory of his brother out, he avoided talking about him and it also hadn't slipped David's attention that the family picture that used to stand on Don's desk was gone, probably banned into a drawer during his time of grieving. However, Don should have realized from the start that his way to deal with this tragedy was doomed to fail, since banning Charlie from his thoughts was practically impossible when they were investigating his death. Sure, he avoided mentioning Charlie's name, he was still trying to treat this like any other case and strip this gruesome affair of any personal feelings, but his whole demeanor showed that one, this course of action came at a cost, and two, it wasn't even working very well.

"So what are we going to do now?" Colby suddenly asked and cleared his throat to get rid of the huskiness of his voice. "About the case I mean?"

David shrugged and forced himself to focus back on the job. Nakamura had been their primary suspect, so abandoning this lead meant that they were now more or less empty-handed, and David couldn't shake the feeling that this was partially because they weren't allowed access to the information they needed. True, thanks to Thompkins, they had been supplied with the personal data of the NSA agents working in their local office. However, they hadn't found any ties to their victim, and David felt a deep dissatisfaction within him thinking that the answer might be found in information they hadn't been granted access to. Maybe there were NSA employees that hadn't made the list Thompkins had given them, because their affiliations to the agency were too distant or secret to be conveyed to them? Or maybe Bourgeois had gotten that code from an agent of a different NSA office than the one Charlie had developed his code at? If that was the case, there was no way to find the tie they were looking for, because despite Thompkins' willingness to help them on their investigation, David doubted that he would go so far as to lay out before them everyone working for the agency.

There was no helping it then, they just had to go with the best lead they had. "Now we do the same with Nakamura's team members," David therefore said. "If one of them is dirty, we should soon find out."

"Alright," Colby mumbled and set to work with a sigh. "By the way, have you heard anything about the autopsy? Shouldn't that be done by now?"

David glanced at his watch. It was now five pm and they had gotten the green light for the autopsy around noon, so Colby was right, if they had started with the autopsy right away, it was high time for the results.

"Speak of the devil," Colby then said as he was looking at a spot behind David's shoulder and stood, suddenly more alert.

David turned around and had no trouble discerning at whom his partner's alertness had been directed.

"Dr. Hunter," he called out surprised when he saw the medical examiner coming straight towards their cubicle. It didn't happen often that their M.E.s found their way up here to the FBI office. He had to admit, he still hadn't warmed up to the man, but he was aware that his personal feelings to his predecessor were probably the cause for that, for even though things between Claudia and him hadn't worked out, he still missed her as a colleague. "What brings you here?"

"Could we discuss this in a more private setting?" Hunter asked and nervously looked around.

Before David could say anything, they were interrupted by Don. "Dr. Hunter! You finally got the results?"

"Well… as I just said, I'd like to discuss this somewhere other than here."

Don frowned at that, but apparently was eager enough to get his hands on that report to do whatever the M.E. requested. When not only he, but the whole team gathered in the small conference room, Dr. Hunter appeared to get a little claustrophobic, but his nervous disposition wasn't going to stop Don from demanding results.

"So, what did you find out?"

"Well…" the doctor started, yet took so long to go on that David was sure Don's patience would run out before he would, but he had underestimated his boss's hardiness. "To tell the truth, I haven't concluded the autopsy yet."

"What?" Hardy or not, even Don had a breaking point.

"Complications have arisen that call for… unusual methods," Dr. Hunter hastened to go on.

"What complications? And what unusual methods?" Colby asked. He too didn't seem to have a lot of patience left.

Dr. Hunter swallowed thickly. "Well, I don't know how to say this, especially since I'm aware that you personally know the... uh, the victim –"

"Just get to the point, will you?" Colby asked not very politely.

Dr. Hunter cleared his throat and even David could feel his patience thinning out. A quick glance at Megan revealed to him that even though she was very quiet, on her face too the tension couldn't be missed. "I have found inconsistencies," the good man finally said before any of them could hustle him further. "The results from the primary examination of the corpse… well, they don't fit what I found in the autopsy."

"How so?" David asked frowning.

"The thing is that… when I opened the corpse, I found signs of decomposition."

David glanced at his colleagues, but their faces were lacking understanding too, so he knew it wasn't just him. "Isn't that normal? It's been three days."

Dr. Hunter sighed and scratched his forehead. "Well no, it's not normal, not under these circumstances. You see, we don't normally see decomposition in burn victims, not to the extent it usually occurs in. The more substantial problem, however, is that the degree of decomposition that I assessed is inconsistent with a time of death dating back three days."

The confusion was perfect now. "What do you mean?" David asked.

"The corpse that I examined has been dead for several weeks, maybe months, depending on how it was preserved, at least if the burning occurred immediately after death."

"But that's impossible," Colby stated. "Charlie was still alive Monday evening, I talked to him."

"And that's precisely what made me doubt that the corpse I've been examining belongs to him."

David felt like he was falling. There was a curious sensation in his stomach and he was feeling a little light-headed. Was he getting this right? "You're saying it may not be him? That the coroner identifying the corpse as Charlie made a mistake?" The volume of his voice had dropped so low that Dr. Hunter might not have heard him if it hadn't been for the dead silence in the room.

"That's what I thought at first. But you see, I checked the DNA profiles, and they are identical. So I'm left with two options here: either Charlie has been dead for several weeks, which you say is not possible, or something is wrong with the DNA database."

Not knowing what to feel himself, David's attention was directed at Don, who was supporting his head with his hands that were blocking his face from their view. He could hear his friend's breathing, too, it was laborious, fighting for control. He wanted to say something, ask something, do anything to make this comprehensible, but he found he wasn't able to.

"So this is why I came here. I wanted to ask you for an item of Charlie so I can do another DNA analysis so we can have certainty on the matter."

For several seconds, they were all waiting for Don to react. At last, he took his hands from his face and stared hard at the medical examiner. "Are you sure?"

David shuddered at the tone. It was low and growling, almost menacing. The look in Don's eyes, however, was even worse.

The effect wasn't lost on Dr. Hunter. "Well no, I mean, I can't be before doing another DNA analysis," he said and couldn't stop himself from stammering a little. "But if Charlie has been alive until Monday, and if he didn't have one of the rare diseases that cause signs of decomposition even before death, which he didn't have according to his medical chart, then I am reasonably certain that he's not the corpse lying on my table."

"Okay then," Don said and stood, leaving the room before any of them could say another word. When they had reached the door, he was already on his way to the elevators. David ran after him and got a hold of him before the doors opened.

"Don! What –"

"I'm getting Charlie's toothbrush," Don said and David actually shrank back, so startled was he by Don's sudden determination, a determination which, to tell the truth, he was finding quite unsettling in its fierceness. "You go check out the whereabouts of the technicians and Nakamura's team members around the time of the accident, like we did with him."

"Don…" David said and took in his boss's appearance. There was something haunted in Don's eyes that sent shivers down David's spine, but there was also something in his whole demeanor that David hadn't seen in days, something of the old Don, and it took him a moment to realize what it was: vigor. Don had found a new goal, one that was giving him strength instead of pressing him down.

"The fact that you're reading this means that I'm either in serious trouble or dead," Don went on before David had time to say anything else, and it took him a moment to realize that he was quoting Charlie's last email to him. Or merely latest email, who knew. "If Charlie's not dead, he might soon be, so we have to get to the bottom of this as fast as we can."

The doors of the elevator opened then and Don stepped in, hitting the button for the doors to close again. "I'll be right back," he said before they slid shut, swallowing him up.

For a moment, David just stood there staring at the doors, trying to get it all in, before he turned around to get back to the others. They had work to do.

* * *

"Don? Is that you again?"

Don took his time to close the door and take a deep breath before he turned around to the room to see his task through. When he came into the living-room, he was relieved to see that Amita and Larry were still there, despite the late hour, and he had a feeling they had been waiting for him to return, still reluctant to leave his dad alone. It hit him that they were much better children to his dad than he himself.

"Hey," he greeted them all and had to realize that their greetings back to him came out slightly reserved, with questions and distrust written on their faces. He dragged a chair over from the dining-room to be able to properly see them all while telling them what he and his team had learned.

"You mind telling us now what this is all about?" his dad asked before he had found the right words.

Don licked his lips and stared at his hands in order to concentrate. He had to do this right. He had to convey the news without causing more pain than was inevitable, for he knew from personal and current experience how badly newborn hope could mess with one's feelings. Given the grief he was still experiencing, he hardly dared giving into that hope and making things better for a while if that meant that he would fall back onto the hard ground of reality soon. That was why he hadn't told them anything earlier, when he had stopped by to get Charlie's toothbrush, just said that he had to take care of something and would return later. On the other hand, his mind kept telling him that there was no reason for such caution now, for now they had scientific proof.

And yet, this wouldn't be the first time that scientific proof didn't live up to the standards set out for it.

"We've had a break in the case," he eventually said and lifted his head to be able to look at them. His gaze landed upon his father's eyes. They were still heavy and dull with grief, and Don wondered if his words might be able to take that look away again. At the same time, he was experiencing a burning sensation of guilt that he tried hard to ignore, for his guilty conscience wasn't going to help him seeing this through. It was difficult to ignore it though, for as long as he could see that look of dull sorrow in his father's eyes, he wondered if he couldn't have prevented it all for him. Had he accepted the news of his brother's death too easily? Should he have figured out sooner that Charlie might still be alive? Maybe he should have gone to see his body after all?

He tried to shake the thought off. Even with all the horrors he'd come across during his career, having to face his little brother's burnt corpse still went over the limit of what Don thought was bearable, and when he'd learned that they had positively ID'd him, that it wasn't absolutely necessary for him to go through with this dreadful task, he'd been more than ready to let go of his self-imposed duty. Even now, Don didn't think seeing the body would have made much of a difference. Earlier, while they had been waiting for the DNA results, he'd seen the pictures Hunter had made during the autopsy, and if he hadn't known about the probable mix-up, he would still have believed this heap of burnt meat and charred skin to be his brother. There had been nothing left to identify him, neither positively nor negatively, and Don found that even now that he knew the truth, now that he could tell himself with all the conviction he could muster that this wasn't his brother, he still had trouble looking at those pictures.

"We did another DNA analysis," he eventually forced himself to continue. For a moment, he'd been about to mention the autopsy, but then managed to refrain himself from doing so. There was no need to upset them before telling them the good news. "It seems that the corpse we found in Charlie's car wasn't him after all."

He thought he could hear the echo of his own words in the deep silence and he bit his lower lip to keep himself focused. He still had trouble believing it himself, and now that he saw the myriad of emotions he too was still experiencing cross over their faces, he had to concentrate mightily in order not to be overcome by them. The giant wave of hope was still accompanied by fear that it would soon turn into despair and drown him. It just seemed too good to be real, just like two days ago, things had seemed too horrible to be real. All this was messing with his mind and soul and putting a strain on him that made it difficult to keep the tears at bay. Was it really possible that Charlie was still alive? And if he was, where was he? _How_ was he? And would they be able to prevent the tragedy from occurring, a tragedy that, in a way, had already occurred?

"What do you mean?" his dad asked, his eyes filled with that familiar mixture of hope and fear, hope that his son might return to life and fear that his hope might soon be put to death.

Don directed his words at his hands, unable to see that look there. "There has been a… a mix-up, if you can call it that. Someone must have tampered with our databases and swapped Charlie's DNA profile with the DNA profile of the victim of a car accident three weeks ago, who had been of a similar built and about his age." After the analysis of Charlie's actual DNA, that had been easy to determine, because his DNA profile hadn't matched the one they had on their databases under his name, but instead had been a perfect match with that victim of drunk driving three weeks ago – a victim that had _not_ been burnt upon death, which explained the signs of decomposition the coroner had found. So apparently, someone had dug up the corpse, put it in Charlie's car and then staged the accident that had left them with a burnt corpse identifiable only by DNA. "The M.E. did another analysis with Charlie's real DNA, that's what I was here for earlier, and he found out that Charlie's DNA doesn't match the one of the corpse that was found in his car."

He was looking into three frowning faces. His hands were cramping up when he saw the emotions in their eyes, for he remembered the pain that was caused by being exposed to the utmost hope and the utmost fear at the same time.

"I don't understand how this should be possible," Larry all but whispered.

"We're not clear on that either, not yet," Don explained and tried to ignore the fact that his dad was hiding his eyes with his hand. However, he couldn't hide his sobs. Half against better knowledge, Don dared to glance at Amita. Her eyes were dry, but from the shocked expression on her face, he figured that the news hadn't fully sunken in yet.

He cleared his throat, concentrating on his task. "We assume that Charlie has been kidnapped. That's also why this needs to stay strictly between us." He let his gaze wander from one to the other, but truth be told, he couldn't be sure whether they were understanding anything of what he was saying. "If his death was staged while in truth he was kidnapped," he went on undeterred, "his kidnappers must have a reason for keeping him alive, and as long as they think nobody's looking for Charlie, they have no reason to get rid of him. In the meanwhile, we have to find him, and fast. That's another reason why I'm here." He turned to Charlie's friends that were still staring at him with wide eyes. "We need your help. Given that Charlie's been missing since Monday night, he might be in serious trouble right now, and we have to find him as soon as possible."

Amita started shaking her head and Don watched as her eyes filled with tears. For a moment, it seemed as though she was about to say something, her lips were slightly parted, they were moving, but she remained silent. Her chin was trembling and Don could see the struggle on her face clearly, the pain and the tears fighting against her self-control. In the end, pain won, and without saying another word, she abruptly stood and left the room.

Don clenched his jaw, telling himself not to think about her nor about the tears he'd seen streaming down her face, but to focus on Larry instead. He'd been serious, they needed the scientists' help, and they needed it fast. Charlie's life might be depending on it, and Don wouldn't have needed the experience of the last couple of days to know what he was willing to invest in a fight with stakes like these.

"Larry, listen to me," he said fiercely, looking him hard in the eye as though he was trying to pierce through the wall of shock. "Someone has him, we're sure of it. But we don't have many leads yet. We have video footage though, so we need you to somehow identify the person on the tape."

Larry was shaking his head. The dazed look was still in his eyes, but now something like despair had crept into them as well. "I don't… I mean, I don't know how. This is something that Charles –"

"Well, he's not here," Don interrupted him.. He was getting impatient, it was getting harder and harder to keep it together when he was confronted with both Larry's and his dad's struggles to regain control over their emotions. "This is our best shot at figuring out who has him." He swallowed down a feeling of anxiety. It hadn't come easy to him to part ways with his team members after having gotten the new DNA results, but eventually he'd realized that they were right, the most important thing had been to inform Larry and Amita and follow the lead of the masked man that had driven Charlie's car. Since at first glance, neither the technicians nor Nakamura's team members seemed to be viable suspects, the only other lead they had, investigating an unknown number of NSA agents, seemed too time consuming to make it a priority. There was just too much data to be checked, which would take too much time if Charlie was indeed being held by someone, so they had to figure out his whereabouts by some other means, and resorting to scientific approaches seemed the natural thing to do under these circumstances.

Larry nodded and despite the dazed look, Don contented himself with that and handed him the flash drive with the video footage. So now, there wasn't much else for him to do. All he could really do was try and get some rest in order to be prepared for whatever the next day might be having in store for them, and pray that Larry might be able to draw some conclusions from that tape.

* * *

**A/N:** Congratulations to whatever55 and whoever else guessed right! Still, I hope that at least some of you were ready to rely on the evidence rather than on the author's reluctance to kill a beloved character so early in the story ;)


	9. Sticks and Stones and Words As Well

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1

* * *

**Chapter 9: Sticks and Stones and Words As Well**

His body was aching. That was what he was aware of even before he was fully awake. There was something hammering against his forehead from the inside, a relentless throbbing pain that made it difficult for him to seek refuge in oblivion. Thus, he had to continue feeling the pain in the rest of his body as well, all those little cuts and bruises and burns that they had inflicted on him. They weren't life-threatening in any way, none of his injuries seemed to be serious, they just hurt. And his aggressors knew that, they knew how to inflict pain without causing any lasting damage.

Too bad Charlie wasn't reassured by that.

To make matters worse, there was also the nausea. His stomach had been feeling funny ever since he'd woken up, and they hadn't made it better by burying their fists in it. Even more uncomfortable, however, seemed the gag in his mouth. The thick cloth was drying his saliva and made it difficult to breathe past it, let alone cry out for help. He'd stopped those attempts long ago anyway. It was robbing him of too much energy and he didn't see any chance of success. He couldn't hear anything from the outside, so chances were that there wasn't anybody out there who could hear him in return.

The cold was something else to make his situation less than comfortable. Ordinarily, the room temperature might have been agreeable, but since he was restrained to this chair and had no opportunity to move, his body didn't produce a lot of heat, and by now he was feeling the lack of heat very noticeably. Besides, they had removed his shirt, preferring their blows and burns to get directly on his skin without being cushioned by the fabric. They were very efficient in that regard.

He heard noises from the hallway and tensed up. They had to be back, or probably only one of them, going by the sound of footsteps. A second later, he silently chastised himself for tensing up and tried to relax his muscles again, closing his eyes, pretending to be asleep, for as long as he was asleep, there was a chance they wouldn't hurt him.

He was forcing himself to take deep and regular breaths and not let it show on the outside how intently he was listening to what was going on. It was easier said than done though, and to make matters worse, Charlie couldn't trust his own body anymore. He didn't know how long he'd been sitting here, but he knew it must have been for long, for several days even. And while they had made sure to keep him alive, to feed him and give him to drink, the lack of movement had strained his body to and beyond its limits. He'd been tied to this chair for the whole time, save for those brief intervals they granted him for his most basic bodily needs, and after merely few hours, his body had revolted mightily against this kind of treatment. His muscles had cramped up and would do so in intervals, no matter how much he ordered them to stop, they would just start convulsing in tremors making him think of an earthquake and taking control over him, while at other times, his limbs would go numb, then tingle uncomfortably when the neurons decided they were ready to take on the pain once more. In short, his body was betraying him, and never before had it struck Charlie so clearly as now just how much his existence depended on its physical dimension.

The footsteps halted before the door to his room. There was a clinking sound and then, the key was turned around.

_Relax_, Charlie desperately told himself, trying to slow down his heartbeat and his breathing. His muscles tensed nonetheless when he heard the door squeak and he hastened to relax them again, to pretend he was still asleep.

He could feel someone staring at him, still near the door, he thought he could hear the man's breathing. He even thought he could tell it was the oldest one of the three, Bill, the one who seemed to be an agent with the NSA and the mastermind behind this operation, whereas the other two, Tony and Eric, seemed to be experts in all kinds of criminal activities. That was about everything that Charlie had been able to learn about his kidnappers, but truth be told, it was already more than he would have liked to know. He knew their names for starters, they had been careless enough to use them in front of him, and he'd seen their faces, so it didn't seem like they were planning on ever releasing him again, not alive.

There was another sound, another door, further away, and Charlie did his best to remain sitting there motionless.

"Where have you been?" Bill called out to the newcomer. "You said you'd be here an hour ago."

"Why, something's up with him?" While he had been talking, Tony's words had become louder until now, when he seemed to be standing directly on the threshold, next to his boss. "Is he out?"

"I doubt it," Bill said. "My guess is he just doesn't want us to continue our little conversation."

Charlie forbade himself to swallow nervously and pretended to be asleep nonetheless. Couldn't hurt.

"About that, I've had an idea," Tony said. "I've just been to the hardware store and I brought this."

Charlie's self-control was stretched to its limits when he heard some clatter and clinking. Still, he refrained from opening his eyes. There was a good chance he wouldn't like what he was going to see anyway.

"What are you thinking?" Much to Charlie's dislike, Bill sounded genuinely interested in whatever his accomplice had come up with.

"We should stop going so easy on him. It's been three days now. I'm thinking it's getting high time we make his life a little less comfortable."

Charlie would have liked to laugh out in incredulity, but somehow managed to keep his breathing calm and inconspicuous.

"So this…?" Bill asked.

"We could fix it on the support beams in the large hall. If we hang him from down there, I don't think he's gonna give us the silent treatment for much longer. I've been told a position like that gets quite unpleasant after a couple of hours."

Charlie could feel his skin crawl. He still wasn't sure what exactly they were planning to do, but their words had made a very vivid and more than unpleasant idea form in his mind. _Please don't_, he silently begged, suddenly thinking that his situation in this cold and clammy cell wasn't that bad after all. It could certainly be worse.

"Alright, get right to it." He could hear footsteps going away and the other pair of footsteps coming closer. He had to contain himself mightily not to shrink back.

"In the meanwhile," Bill said and Charlie could feel his breath on his face, "we're going to have a little chat. You can stop pretending now, you're fooling no one. Or do you want me to wake you up? You know I have my methods."

Seeing no point in letting this drag on further, Charlie opened his eyes and lifted his head, trying to ignore the stabbing pain that shot through it. His mind was soon taken off that though, for Bill roughly pulled the gag out of his mouth. He coughed and carefully flexed his jaw. It was good to be able to breathe more easily, but Bill hadn't been very delicate removing the rough cloth.

"So?" Bill pressed when he was certain to have his attention. "You've had some time to think, have you come to your senses?"

Charlie gave him a stare in which he tried to put all his hatred for this man.

"Anything you wanna tell me?"

_Go to hell_, had been lying on the tip of his tongue, but in the end, the words were left unspoken. Antagonizing his tormentor just for antagonizing's sake didn't seem very prudent.

"Well, that's a shame really," Bill said and started wrapping his knuckles in gauze, something he always did before starting to throw punches at him. Obviously he didn't want to walk around with battered hands, and for a moment Charlie wished he could have luxury problems like those.

He watched him prepare his hands for the task and swallowed uneasily. While he didn't want to give them what they were asking of him, he wasn't too thrilled at the prospect of enduring another one of their 'interrogations' either, and the temptation of just giving in grew with every beating he had to endure. The only thing that enabled him to adhere to his resolution of keeping his silence was his conviction that there were people out there looking for him. True, that conviction had been unsettled when Bill had told him that they all thought he was dead, that there was nobody looking for him, that he and Tony and Eric had all the time they wanted to wear him down, but his hope had withstood this challenge when he'd realized that it didn't matter. No matter whether he was considered dead or alive, Don still knew that there was something not kosher about this, so he must have notified Thompkins by now, and chances were that both the NSA and Don himself were investigating in this matter. Finding the source of the leaking of the code would lead them to his kidnappers and thus eventually to Charlie himself, so nothing had changed after all, he still had to hold out until Don would have found him.

In the meanwhile, all he had to do was keep his mouth shut about the code, and that was what he had been doing ever since he'd woken up bound to this chair. At first, they'd only asked him what he knew about the code, for apparently, they had watched him when he'd been in Bourgeois's office. Soon, however, they had somehow figured out that he had been the one to write that code, probably Bill had found out at work. So from that moment onward, their goal had been clear, they wanted him to explain the code and reveal ways in which they would be able to go around it, and since that was something that Charlie wasn't willing to give up, they had reached an impasse. True, his code had been designed to withstand such attacks, but in every code serving security purposes, there was always the weighting between security and operability, so the more they knew about how the code was working, the easier it would be for them to hack into the system nonetheless.

They had been asking him about the code for days now and he'd soon become sick and tired of those more than unpleasant interrogations. Still, he couldn't give in, he couldn't give them the information they were asking for. One, because he couldn't foresee how much harm they would cause if he actually gave them some pointers as to how to break or rather where to attack his code. That, however, wasn't the real reason that made him keep his silence and that had been making him keep his silence for several days now. No, as much as Charlie hated to admit it to himself, his real motive was far more egotistical than any concerns about a security breach within the NSA, for he knew that as soon as his kidnappers had what they wanted, they would have no reason for keeping him alive any longer.

As much as he didn't want them to kill him, though, he was neither very thrilled at the prospect of them continuing to try and reach their goal, so he had to do something, _anything_, to keep them from exerting their 'persuasions'.

"Why should I tell you?" He swallowed again, nervously. He seemed to have lost the ability to produce saliva. Maybe the gag had something to do with it. More likely though it was the fear.

The kidnapper raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. "Really? I thought it was pretty obvious why."

"I mean," Charlie said hastily before Bill would start throwing punches at him again, "what's in it for me? You're doing it for the money, aren't you? So if I told you how to break the code, I think it would be fair to count me in."

The kidnapper gave a laugh at that and Charlie nervously clenched his jaw. Alright then, that hadn't been working very well. However, it had been worth a try, for faking negotiations still seemed a whole lot better than being beaten to a pulp.

"We'll do this differently, Doctor Eppes," the other man taunted. "You're gonna get something in return if you _don't_ tell me what we want to know, and that is the crap beaten out of you. You tell us, we'll stop beating you up, that's the deal we're offering you." He was silent for s couple of seconds, then went on, "I've got to admit, I thought that by now you'd be begging us to let you take that deal. Seems like Tony was right and we have indeed been a little too soft on you. Good thing we can easily change that."

He'd hardly finished talking before out of nowhere, his fist appeared and only the fracture of a second later, Charlie felt something explode in the pit of his stomach. He doubled over in pain and would have given a lot if he'd been able to put his arms out front, but he couldn't, he was still bound to that chair.

"You do realize we're just getting started though, don't you?" Charlie shrank back at hearing the bittersweet whisper so close to his ear, but there was no escaping his tormentor. "We have so much more up our sleeve than all those little bruises. But to tell you the truth, I'm in no rush to stop our little chit-chats anytime soon, though it somehow seems you're not seeing eye to eye with me there. So let me ask you, do you really think this is worth it?" He paused for a moment, maybe to let him think about those words, but to tell the truth, Charlie was much too occupied with the pain in his stomach as though he could have thought about anything. "Just tell me how to break the code, and we'll leave you alone."

Charlie clenched his jaw and closed his eyes until he could feel the kidnapper straighten himself and getting away from him.

"Alright. Your choice."

Charlie shuddered at the tone, and his tremble continued when he saw what his kidnapper was up to now. He shook his head. "Please don't," the words came over his lips before his pride had had time to hold them back. His pride had lost all its power though, ever since it had been overpowered by his fear.

Charlie's eyes were fixed on the metal object that his kidnapper had taken up. He flinched and closed his eyes tightly when the other man turned it on, just a quick flicker, just to taunt him. Too bad it was working.

He forced himself to open his eyes and glare at his tormentor, while at the same time he tried his best not to look at the electric cattle prod in his hand. He was scared of this. He remembered the pain from the last time they had used it, and the burns were still stinging on his body.

He tensed his muscles as Bill slowly drew nearer, the electric prod held out in front of him, slowly, as if to savor each droplet of cold sweat his menacing was extracting from his victim.

Charlie's breathing had become quick and shallow and then, with a stab, the electric prod plunged forward, right between his lower ribs. Charlie's body acted on its own account then, there was no mind to control it, the muscles were contracting, the limbs convulsing, the lungs screaming with pain. He was praying for it to stop, but it didn't, there was no end to it, even though later, Charlie realized that it couldn't have been more than a couple of seconds.

Eventually, the electric prod was gone, the convulsion receded, leaving behind just tiny spasms that would rock his body from time to time. Charlie was bent over as much as he could, panting, yet forcing himself to get back on track, to do an inventory of his body and make sure that as hellish as all this had been, still all it had left behind was pain, no lasting damage. Besides the sting beneath his ribs, there was the general muscle ache, accompanied by fatigue, and the sting around his wrists. Luckily, the ropes they had used to tie his hands together and to tie him to his chair were thick enough so that they wouldn't normally cut into his flesh. However, whenever his body was rattled by those electric shocks, that was another story.

He hadn't finished his inventory yet when Bill was claiming his attention again. "I love it when you dance for me," he said in a mocking tone that almost made the tears spring to Charlie's eyes. He didn't want to let his taunting get to him, but right now, ignoring him was beyond his power, and even despising him didn't work. He just didn't understand. How could someone be so cruel to another human being? "You love dancing for me, too? Well, obviously. Otherwise you would just make me stop, wouldn't you?"

Charlie was silent, still fighting tears of pain and despair.

"I'll let you dance then," Bill said with a menacing tone in his voice that made shudders run down Charlie's spine. As he watched Bill draw nearer again, the hated tool in his hand approaching, all he wanted to do was get away from this, do anything to escape from this nightmare. He couldn't though, not when he didn't want to escape right into death, and that was something he wasn't ready for. Not yet at least.

He reared up and screamed as the electric prod hit him again. He'd tried to prepare for the pain, he'd tensed his muscles, but it had been of no use. As soon as he was exposed to the electric shock, his whole body defied control, and all that was left for Charlie to do was wait for it to be over and then try to regenerate.

He was still panting, trying to make his breaths deeper, to make his heart beat slow down again, when that hateful voice came at him again, "Anything you want to tell me now?"

Charlie closed his eyes and was seriously tempted to reply with an expletive, but in the end, there was no strength left in his body nor in his mind to counter anything to the taunting he was exposed to.

Bill sighed dramatically. "You really think that serving the NSA and obeying their stupid rules is a wise decision? Are you actually willing to die for that stupid code?"

Charlie clenched his jaw. He wasn't going to tell them he knew perfectly well that he had a far greater chance to die if he gave up the code instead of keeping his silence.

Bill gave a derisive laugh. "Geez, this is really something. You know, I used to be just like you. Loyalty they call it. Stupidity, that's what it is."

Charlie felt feelings awaken he rarely felt, and that was why it took him some time to identify them as anger and disgust. He resented the fact that this man was talking about his ideals like that – ideals that should have been his own. He was an agent, he was supposed to protect national security and serve his country with integrity. Charlie felt his guts burning when he compared him to Don and the team and all the other agents he'd come to know. Bill's betrayal seemed suddenly more personal to him, he wasn't merely going for the cash or going against an institution or against some abstract construct of ideas, he was going against all those men and women who had sworn to protect their fellow citizens and were risking their own health every single day honoring that oath.

So, not fully convinced what he was doing was prudent, but feeling that it was right, Charlie said, "I can't see anything stupid in not betraying everything you stand for."

"Betraying? This isn't betrayal, we're talking about self-preservation here."

If he could have, Charlie might have laughed at that. "You sell the information you're picking off the telecommunication system, don't you? Where do you think this information ends up? You're sabotaging everything you and your colleagues work for everyday, just for financial gain."

There was a smile on Bill's face that gave Charlie the creeps. "Your world is really just black and white, isn't it? You have no idea what it means to play off your ideals against each other."

Charlie was about to disagree, to say that he'd been confronted with his fair share of gray areas as well, but he had a feeling that his aggressor had gotten himself into a talkative mood, and as long as he was talking, he wasn't trying to get Charlie to talk. Therefore, he kept his silence and listened.

"I can hardly blame you though," Bill went on. "I was like that too when I became an agent. I joined the fight against all those black sheep of society, I busted my ass off for that purpose, regardless of personal costs. And if someone had asked me to betray national secrets back then, I would have done what you are doing right now, I would have refused, I would have appealed to all those ideals like loyalty and righteousness." His tone became bitter and mocking. "You always got to do 'the right thing', don't you?" He gave a hysterical laugh that made Charlie's skin crawl. "I'm telling you, there is no right thing. It's just rules, and it's their rules, and all they do is use you and then discard you when they don't need you any longer, and I'm sick of them twisting their rules so that they always keep winning. I'm just taking back what I deserve."

Charlie was silent. He didn't know what to say. Even though he hadn't learned any details, there seemed to be something twisted about the other man's reasoning, but he didn't think it wise to point that out to him. It probably wouldn't have had any effect on him anyway. He seemed to have fabricated the facts into a story that made sense to him and that gave him a justification for his behavior.

At the same time, Charlie wasn't sure whether it was real. When he'd been working for the NSA, he'd been involved in cases that were similar to what he was now experiencing on a first hand basis, about people being held, people that were made to reveal information. _Resisting the__ir opponents__ gets harder and harder the longer they're being held_, Taro Nakamura had told him once. Charlie had thought to know what he was talking about, he had thought he understood the dynamics between physical pain and psychological pressure. Taro however had made him see that this was only the tip of the iceberg. _They try to build a relationship with their victim_, he'd explained_. They're often masters in mind reading and manipulation and they tell them whatever they think is necessary to win their trust._ At the time, Charlie had had difficulty imagining how you could start trusting someone who was holding you against your will. Now, however, after days in isolation, he had to realize that he was so desperate to form a relationship with someone, to trust someone, anyone in fact, that if his aggressor was the only one who offered that to him, it was hard to resist that.

The worst thing was that even though Charlie was aware that Bill might be playing him, that didn't hinder for his words to have some effect on him. He was starting to think of him not as his tormentor, but as a person, as a human being, despite all the inhuman behavior he was showing towards him.

Charlie shuddered. He was afraid. He was afraid of what Bill was going to do to him, not just to his body, but also to his mind. For a while, he had allowed himself to hope, he had thought that he would be able to withstand whatever they would throw at him for as long as it would take Don to find him. Now, however, his hope was shrinking, slowly turning into despair. This was escalating, and fast. Now that they were wearing down his mind as well, he didn't know where to take the resources from to withstand the pain, and once they were done building that new fastening device they had talked about earlier, the pain would increase even further. For a moment, this prospect was about to pull him down into the depths of despair where there was no coming back from, but right before he got pulled down, he forced himself to breathe. _Calm down_, he told himself. _One breath after another, in and out._ _Breathe in, and breathe out._

This was it. This was the way he was going to survive this. Breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, only living in the moment, not thinking ahead if it wasn't necessary. And above all, never abandoning the hope that Don was going to find him.


	10. Under Pressure

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1

* * *

**Chapter 10: Under Pressure**

"Don, hey! And I thought I was here early."

Don gave a start and rubbed his eyes, slowly becoming aware that he must have fallen asleep at his desk. He half turned around to see who the newcomer was, gave David a muffled 'hey' back and glanced at the clock on his computer. Seven am. He ran his hands over his face and only now noticed how much his eyes were burning with fatigue. No wonder, given how little sleep he'd caught these last couple of nights.

Yesterday had been especially bad. After delivering his father, Amita and Larry the news, he'd felt so exhausted both physically and emotionally that he'd thought it would be an easy thing to fall asleep, to get some badly needed rest so that he would then be able to start fresh in the morning. However, when he'd been lying in his bed, he'd had to realize that his intentions had been completely out of the way. Sleep had been out of the question. Charlie was out there somewhere, and chances were that he was in serious trouble. How could Don even think of sleep? He had to do something, he had to continue working the case. Then again, he knew he had to take care of his bodily needs, otherwise he could never hope to be able to help his brother. He had to be at his best if he wanted to get him out of this mess, so he had to try and get some shut-eye after all.

In the end, he'd abandoned the attempt. Sleep hadn't come and Don had decided that this was stupid. He didn't get any sleep, but he wasn't productive either. The rational solution was going back to work and trying to find anything else that would bring them one step closer to finding Charlie.

But what was there to be done? True, he could go on checking Nakamura's team members, but they hadn't found anything suspicious on them at first glance, nor on the technicians that had been assigned with implanting Charlie's code. It seemed as though despite the life-changing news, they were still stuck concerning the case. Yes, for all it seemed, Charlie was still alive, but that didn't –

_Whoa, stop right there_, Don's mind had told him then. They _did _have a new lead! The new turn of events had indeed brought them one giant leap forward! They could simply check by whom Charlie's entry in the DNA database had been altered, and then they would have their kidnapper!

As if electrified, he'd bolted down the stairs and into Charlie's garage. Larry had just been filling in Amita, who had apparently just joined him there. When Don had told them about his idea, they had been more than ready to accompany him to the FBI office to continue their work there, where they could access the necessary information.

And now they were here, and they were back to square one. It had taken a little while to make sure that they hadn't left any stone unturned, but in the end Larry and Amita had ascertained that Don's plan, as beautiful as it had been in theory, did not work out in practice, for whoever had swapped the profiles had also erased any information indicating that the entries had been altered. At least they now knew that their adversary had some notable knowledge in computer science, but since they were still convinced that their adversary was somehow affiliated with the NSA, that was hardly surprising.

Ever since that blowback, Don's adrenaline level had dropped considerably and his fatigue and headache had increased while he was trudging through the information they had on Nakamura's team members.

"You okay?" he heard David ask.

He nodded, still massaging the bridge of his nose to make the sleepiness leave his eyes. "Sure," he said, but had to realize that he was sounding tired and drained. His voice was raucous and lacked the tension and sharpness that normally gave him the appearance of a self-reliant, determined fed.

"Have you found anything?"

He hesitated briefly, unwilling to admit to either himself or to David what the past hours of work had yielded, and eventually shook his head. "Nothing."

There was a lump in his throat. He hadn't heard anything from Larry and Amita yet either. When he'd checked on their progress on the security footage an hour or so ago, they had still been 'working on it', as they had put it. Don had to admit he was still a little uneasy when he thought of Amita's appearance. The shock that had been on her face when she'd been confronted with the news had left, but it had made way to something… Don didn't quite know how to describe it, he only knew he was finding it unsettling. There was something unsteady about her, in the shaking of her hands, in the tremble of her lips, in the flicker in her eyes, but at the same time, she had assumed a demeanor of hardness that Don didn't know of her. It had crossed his mind that he probably should have asked her if she was sure she was up to this or if she didn't rather want to step away from this case, but that had only been a theoretical option. Charlie was in trouble and they needed any help they could get, and that included hers.

"Maybe..." David started and Don's head jerked around towards him. "I don't know, but maybe we should choose a more direct approach after all, even if that means alerting whoever is behind this."

Don sighed deeply and stared at his desk so hard as though it was holding the solution to this problem. David might be right. Before now, they had been investigating the NSA minimally invasively since they hadn't wanted the culprits to know that someone was poking around in this affair. At first, they had thought this necessary in order to prevent them from hiding their tracks, but now, the necessity seemed even more binding, for if they had Charlie, and if he was still alive, then they were running the risk that his kidnappers would panic and get rid of him once they thought someone was after them, and that was a risk Don wasn't willing to take. On the other hand, given they had no other leads to follow… he could hardly leave his brother to his fate and do nothing, right?

"You're right, we should start asking around," he said and thought for a second, then decided, "Megan and I are going to go to the local NSA office to try and figure out on site who might have known about the code and could have gained access to it, and you and Colby should head to CalSci to see if someone noticed anything out of the ordinary Monday night." He was about to add another order, but hesitated. He didn't really trust his own judgment these days, so he turned his words into a question instead, "Do you think we should ask Nakamura which agents he thinks are most likely behind this?"

David tilted his head and started nervously scratching a spot behind his ear, but Don could already see the answer in his eyes. It had made sense not to trust the NSA agent as long as they hadn't checked him out, that had been a healthy form of distrust. Continuing that distrust now, however, when they had no reason for it, worse, when all they had found had been reasons to trust Nakamura, didn't seem prudent, and that was what David's eyes and his whole posture were telling Don even before he opened his mouth. "I really think we should. He checks out, on every level, even his team does, and I can't believe that he's just pulling off a big scam. I don't think we can allow ourselves to go without his help, we don't have the time for that." He paused and added more quietly, "More to the point, Charlie may not have the time for that."

* * *

"Five thousand nine hundred and twelve." Her voice sounded hollow and she was still staring at the computer screen, feeling like it was betraying her and pulling her down into the depths of dark despair.

Larry too was unbelieving. "That match the picture from the footage? Oh my, that is… quite a lot."

Amita let loose a sound that was somewhere between laughing and crying. Definitely closer to crying. Initially, when she had joined Larry in his work after they had learned the news last night, she had felt guilty for not getting to work to find Charlie immediately, for wasting one of those precious hours with crying. Now, however, she didn't think it was making much of a difference. Even now that she was finally doing something, she was entirely useless. No matter how hard she was trying to concentrate, her emotions kept coming back and getting in her way, and she was getting angry and impatient with her inability to simply do what needed to be done. She couldn't tell for sure whether it was her inability to keep her emotions in check or her scientific shortcomings, but the fact was she felt like there was something she should have been able to do, she just couldn't do it. She was letting Charlie down.

"How many within California?"

Amita jumped a little and closed her eyes in concentration. Focusing was getting hard given that she hadn't gotten any sleep last night. And, of course, given that she had no idea whether or not the man she loved was still alive.

"This _is _within California," she said and had to realize that her tone wasn't very friendly. "It's about 40 000 hits nationwide."

"Oh. _Oh._ Okay then," Larry said and ran his hand through his hair, looking for a moment as though he was about to pull it out. Amita could tell that he was just as upset by those results as she was, but he still wouldn't admit the failure of their endeavor. "Okay. So we simply start narrowing these down."

"And how?" Amita retorted more forcefully than she had intended. She couldn't hold herself back though. Her emotions had been on a weird roller coaster ride ever since she'd learned about Charlie's death, and while she had no longer to deal with the grief now, the panic wasn't much easier to bear. "We already narrowed it down by merely considering those with a criminal record, so we can't even be sure that the kidnapper is among those 5000."

"And if we compare our results to the list of NSA employees?"

Amita sighed. "None of those even has a criminal record. There are four NSA agents from the local office that have a significant overlap with the face from the video footage, but that's simply because a too large percentage of the population fit that image, it's just too vague. We need to think of something else to get out more of that picture than what we have now."

"But if we do have four matches between the video footage and the NSA office where Charles developed that code, we have created a manageable list of suspects."

"But they are no suspects!" Amita exclaimed. She was getting more impatient the more her frustration was growing, and her frustration was growing the more time was running out without them finding anything of significance. "Don told us that the man from the footage is probably just a handyman, that they think he'd done something like this before, so we need to look for this man within those 5000 people with a criminal record!"

She realized she was getting hysterical, but she was slowly reaching her breaking point.

Larry sighed and she bit her lip, assuming he was getting fed up with her emotiveness and realizing he was right in doing so. "Amita," he said much more gently than she would have expected as he took her hand and looked her in the eye, and she had to blink the tears away. "If there is one thing that I have learned while assisting Charles on his projects for the FBI, it is that being ready to abandon your assumptions is a much more common necessity than when working within an academic field."

"What are you saying?" Amita asked, wiping her eyes.

"I'm saying that we have a list of suspects and we should show it to the team. Just remember that we are working with probabilities here. Maybe it's unlikely that the man on this footage is working for the NSA, and maybe it's unlikely that he doesn't have a criminal record, but from what I understand, the reasons for making those assumptions are anything but compelling, so it is certainly worthwhile to widen our scope again."

Amita felt the tears coming harder, but was unable to stop them. "But we can't allow ourselves to widen our scope. We have to find him. He's been..." She broke off, unwilling to think of all the time that had elapsed since Charlie had stopped being with them. "We need to narrow the list down, not looking for further groups to add to that list."

Larry was silent for a moment and she could see in his eyes that at bottom, he agreed with her. "We should show this to the team," he repeated instead, still not accepting defeat. "Maybe in the meanwhile, there has come up another angle that we can examine, for I think that we have done the best we could with the security footage."

Amita nodded while she felt her throat close up. The bad thing was that one, she was agreeing with Larry that they had done the best they could with that picture, and that two, she realized that their best efforts hadn't brought them any step closer to finding Charlie.

* * *

"Let's get him down, I don't want him to break lose while we're gone."

Words. Someone had been speaking, which meant that someone was there, which meant that there might be pain waiting for him. He tried to open his eyes to see what he was up against, but found that he couldn't. Opening his eyes required too much energy.

Instead, Charlie forced himself to stay alert, to stay awake and listen to the conversation between his kidnappers. Apparently, however, they were done talking, and Charlie didn't think he liked that, for if they were done talking, they were likely to start acting, and with no words, he was left to insecurity and guessing what they were going to do to him.

It had to be morning now, which meant one, that they were about to get back to work (or at least that was what Charlie was fervently hoping), and two, that he'd spent most part of the night in the new position they had thought up for him, with his hands bound together and fixated to the support beams of the ceiling with a rope that was just long enough to enable him to stand on the ground. Standing, however, was only possible when there was still strength left in his body, and that hadn't always been a given after a couple of hours into the night.

It also seemed as though his kidnappers had stayed with him during the night, and Charlie didn't like this new development. Until now, they had left him alone for most of the time, either during the night or while they had been at their day jobs, and in retrospect, Charlie had to admit he was fairly content with their old routine. He'd been restrained to that chair, he'd been locked in, but compared to what he had endured the past night, his position then hadn't been too uncomfortable. He had been sore and the nerves in his body had fired noxious stimuli to his brain every time he had moved (or every time they had conducted on of their 'interrogations'), but he'd still been able to block out the pain most of the times. Now, hung from the ceiling and feeling as though his arms were ripped out of his torso every time his legs gave away, blocking the pain out was no longer an option.

He heard them closing in on him and tensed up, and a moment later heard himself groan. This was hurting. How could just tensing his muscles hurt so badly? Why couldn't this just stop? Why couldn't –

"Come on, time to wake up," Tony's voice bellowed close to his ear before he grabbed him roughly at his arms. Charlie yelled. The movement had caused a searing pain that shot through his shoulders and diverged from there in two directions, down his back and up his arms. He didn't really know what was happening, only felt himself dragged along by their rough hands. His eyes had shot open, but all he could really see were the white lights the pain had put there as he stumbled along the hallway, trying to keep up with their dragging in order to find the way of minimal resistance.

It couldn't have been more than a few dozen yards before they came to a stop and Charlie was pushed down on the chair again. After the hours hung from the ceiling, sitting felt so comfortable he might have fallen asleep any moment. Before he could, however, his arms were pulled back, leaving him no thought of sleep or repose. Instead, he cried out in pain again as he felt as though every fiber in his shoulders was on fire and being ripped apart. He tried to control the pain, he tried to take deeper breaths, but he couldn't, all that his efforts resulted in was gasps of pain and deplorable whimpering.

He could feel a face close to his and he wanted to shrink back, but he couldn't, he had no strength left.

"Is there something you want to tell me?" Bill's soft voice came to his ear. It was almost singing, luring. "You know I can make it all stop," he continued and while he was saying the words, he laid a hand on Charlie's curls. As he started to stroke his hair, he went on, "All I'm asking for is a little favor in exchange, and then you'll be free."

Charlie could feel his eyes burning and a moment later, the tears were streaming down his cheek, running down his neck and then down his chest, since he had no opportunity to stop them.

"There, there," Bill went on in that soothing voice, still patting his hair and soothing him, "it's all gonna be fine. Just tell me how to break this code and I'm gonna make it all better for you."

Charlie would have liked to be brave, he would have liked to be able to tell him to go to hell, but he couldn't. His throat had closed up and his tears still wouldn't stop. He was willing them to stop, he wanted to face his kidnappers like a man, to fight them, but he couldn't. Bill's soothing, while Charlie had no illusions about its fake character, was hitting him hard, for he _wanted_ it to be real, he _wanted_ someone to be there for him and tell him that everything was going to be fine, he wanted it so badly that it hurt.

"Tell me, how can I break this code?"

Charlie felt a shudder run down his spine. That bittersweet voice was making him cringe, and it was making him scared, for who knew how much longer he would still be in his right mind, how much longer he would still be able to tell their lies from the truth, the luring from reality?

"Go to hell," someone said, and when Charlie realized that it had been himself, he almost flinched, frightened by his own cheekiness.

Bill didn't make him wait for long to regret his words. For a moment, he just stood there, he had straightened himself and was looking down at him, but after only a couple of seconds, he bent down again, bringing his mouth back close to Charlie's ear. "I wouldn't have done that if I were you," he whispered.

The next moment, hell broke free. There was pain, and it was everywhere, and it didn't leave room for another thought or feeling, it didn't leave room for orientation, neither in space nor in time, and it didn't leave room for fear or hope.

Then, however, it was over, and Charlie slowly came back, gasping, panting, trying to get back to the here and now, back from hell. His shoulder was still burning, but at least Bill had let go of it now.

When he thought he was able to take it again, Charlie carefully stretched his fingers, trying to get back some feeling in his arms and hands. He swallowed thickly when he realized that something was definitely not right with his shoulders. Maybe the muscles were just strained, but given the pain he was experiencing, given how much pain Bill had been able to cause him by simply pulling back his arms, he wouldn't have been a whole lot surprised if there had been something wrong with them that was far less easily reversible.

"You know what, I'm a little confused here," Bill's voice came back then. By now, however, he had dropped the show. Instead of luring and soothing, his tone had become cold and taunting. "On paper, you look like that certified genius, but from where I'm standing, it's much more likely you're certifiable. You're being an idiot here, don't you realize that? Why would you still choose all this pain when you could make it stop so easily?"

Charlie clenched his jaw, trying to prevent himself from saying something that he might regret later, be it a verbal attack or a consent for collaboration. After all, he knew that Bill was right. Giving in would be so much easier, so much less painful. _Why don't you just do it?_, a voice in his head asked, and Charlie started trembling when he realized that he didn't know the answer to this question immediately, when only after several seconds, he remembered that stopping the pain would mean choosing death.

Suddenly scared beyond measure, Charlie frantically searched for something to hold onto, something that would keep him levelheaded, that would enable him to remember why he was doing all this. He just had to keep the pain at an arm's length, he had to consider it as something that didn't really concern him, and focus on the cold, hard facts. At bottom, he was dealing with simple logic here that made it all so much easier and so much clearer to him: if he told his kidnappers about the code, they would kill him, and if he wanted to stay alive, he needed to avoid doing things that would result in them killing him. Thus, he couldn't tell them about the code.

The problem with this short sequence of simple syllogisms was that the conclusion was wrong, or in any case it didn't follow from the premises. There was another premise he had to add in order to make the conclusion true, and that underlying premise was the problem at root, for the conclusion that he couldn't tell his kidnappers about the code only held if he assumed that the underlying premise was true, that he wanted to stay alive when staying alive meant being held in this torture chamber.

So in the end, it was still very simple, for there was only one question he had to ask himself: did he want to live or did he want to die?


	11. Raw Nerves

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1**  
A/N:** Thanks to hengrimm for pointing out the parallel to Colby's experience from 4-01! It's still not central, but at least it got finally mentioned.

* * *

**Chapter 11: Raw Nerves**

Colby stepped off the elevator and took a look around, but didn't spot anyone from his team. He figured that they were probably already assembled in the conference room, for he was running a little late. He only hoped that his team members had been more successful than him, for he had hit another dead end. This seemed to be what they were doing in this case, following lead after lead and hitting dead end after dead end, and Colby couldn't help but think that the reason for this might be lying in the fact that all their leads were pretty thin to begin with.

After he and David had been to CalSci, they had split up in order to cover more ground in less time. Colby had hoped to be able to find some evidence or clues by examining the grave of the corpse that had been passed off as Charlie's. And indeed, when he'd taken a closer look, he had found signs indicating that the earth of the still fresh grave might have been upturned lately, but that had been everything that he'd been able to figure out. None of the people he'd spoken to had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, and so he'd had to come back empty-handed.

He tensely licked his lip and clenched his fists in order to stop his hands from shaking. They somehow had to stop coming up empty, they had to find a solid lead, it was about high time. By now, the relief that Colby had initially felt that Charlie apparently wasn't dead after all, that he still had a chance to make things right, was starting to morph into panic. It felt like he was letting him down _again_, and it seemed as though his failure now was so much worse than the last time because now he knew, he knew what they were up against, and he knew what was at stake.

He pushed open the door to the conference room and hadn't fully stepped in yet when he felt as though he had hit a wall. For a moment, he just stared at the man sitting at the table without being able to say or do anything. When that moment passed, however, he forced himself to pull himself together and act civilly.

"Hello," he greeted the other man and felt stupid as he became aware of the awkwardness of his greeting. However, this _was_ awkward, he wouldn't be able to change that.

"Agent Granger," Nakamura greeted him back somewhat coolly, and the worst thing was that Colby could hardly blame him for his reservedness. "So tell me, is this another one of your little tricks to interrogate me again? Or have you decided to simply beat a confession out of me?"

Colby grimaced, but fought to remain standing upright, even though he couldn't help but notice the heat rising to his head. "No ulterior motive here," he said. "Just asking for your insight, like you offered the day before yesterday."

Nakamura nodded, but stayed silent. Colby, still feeling more than uncomfortable being alone with this man, turned at the closed door as though his colleagues might join them any second, but they seemed to be still busy with their current tasks.

He sighed. This was stupid. He needed to finally take responsibility for what he'd done.

"Listen, I'm sorry," he said and forced himself to look Nakamura in the eye. "I was out of line Wednesday. We didn't have enough evidence to hold and interrogate you the way we did, and even if we had, I shouldn't have… well, you know," he ended with a nod towards Nakamura's black eye.

Nakamura looked back at him calmly, steadily, and Colby had to restrain himself from shifting from one foot to the other.

"You're right," Nakamura eventually said earnestly. There was some silence, and Colby swallowed nervously. This was the moment when Nakamura was supposed to say 'It's okay, no hard feelings'. He didn't, though. Instead, he said, "I hope you don't expect me to say it's okay, because it certainly wasn't."

Colby clenched his jaw and looked down at the floor. "I know it wasn't," he said and had difficulty to give his voice a determined, self-reliant tone, since he was feeling anything but self-reliant. "As I said, I was out of line, and I'm sorry for that, I really am, but what's done is done. I can't change what happened, so what do you want me to do here?"

"I'll tell you what I want you to do, I want you to try and find who's really behind this and stop misusing Charlie's death as an excuse for your war against the NSA."

Colby gaped at the other agent. "I've never –" he started, but was interrupted by the opening of the door.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," Don said as he and Megan whooshed in and took their seats at the table. "We had to check in with our consultants, but eventually we agreed that it'd be better if they simply joined this briefing."

As if on cue, the door opened again and David stepped in, followed by Amita and Larry.

"Consultants?" Nakamura repeated when they had all sat down and eyed the two nervous-looking scientists with a mixture of curiosity and skepticism, while Colby was still struggling to understand what he'd just accused him of.

"Charlie often works with them whenever he consults for us," Don explained.

Colby's mind was taken off Nakamura's last words to him for a moment when he saw the NSA agent grimace and raise an eyebrow at Don's explanation, and he was sure that Don's use of the present tense was the cause for it. His hunch was soon confirmed.

"Let me say something upfront," Nakamura started and leaned forward, looking Don straight in the eye. "I understand that you want to find who did this, and I do realize that there are some security issues at play here that make it seem unwise to include more people in what's going on than have already been informed. But do you really think you should be working this case? If I'm getting this right, all of you have been fairly close to Charlie, and you obviously haven't come to terms with his death yet. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to criticize you for that, I just don't think that it's wise to let you investigate this with a mindset like yours, especially you, Agent Eppes."

Colby noticed Megan's piercing gaze that was directed at Don and spoke volumes, and for once he was tempted to agree with her. If they wanted Nakamura's help, they should be honest with him, and that included telling him that Charlie, as far as they knew, was still alive. However, that had been a point that Don hadn't left open for negotiation, he'd decided to first make sure that Nakamura was indeed on their side and able to help them before he would consider widening their small circle of trust to include him as well.

"You can rest assured that we can handle this," Don therefore replied in a tone that might have seemed a little offhand to someone who wasn't aware of the time pressure he was experiencing. "I think we should get down to it now, wouldn't you say so? So I suppose you've formed some opinions. Do you have any specific theories you'd like to share, maybe even suspects?"

For a moment, Nakamura just looked at Don closely as if to decide whether or not to answer his question, but in the end, he seemed to think that holding back wasn't going to do much of a difference anyway, for he shook his head no. "I took a look at the case file from Charlie's assignment last month. There had been several incidents in the months prior to it where it was assumed that confidential information had been accessed from outside by intercepting the phoning devices, and there had been indications that someone from within the NSA had been involved, but there had never been any specific suspects, at least not to my knowledge. It was just said that since the risk of a leak on the inside was given, the assignment of enhancing the code should be kept under wraps, and that's what we did as far as we could."

"So how could anyone have known about the code and Charlie's involvement?" Don asked.

Nakamura shrugged. "Well, noticing that a new code had been inserted would have become obvious to our guy once intercepting the phone messages the way he used to was no longer working. But how he might have figured out that Charlie was involved… I don't know. All that I could think of was that maybe someone remembered he was a consultant during the time the new code had been developed. You know, most people at the office knew him, at least by sight, it would have been easy for them to find out his name and further information."

Don nodded, but didn't say anything else. Colby exchanged a quick glance with David and immediately knew they were thinking the same thing: if they wanted to work with Nakamura, they should tell him about how they thought the culprits had learned about Charlie's involvement, namely by hacking into Bourgeois's computer and spying on them while investigating the crime scene. Don, however, didn't seem to have any inclination of confiding their theory to the NSA agent.

"What I'm still not clear on," Nakamura went on, "is how they managed to stage this as an accident. If your people still haven't found anything that points to foul play on Charlie's car, it means they must have somehow incapacitated him during the ride, and I have trouble thinking of something that would have been sudden enough to cause an accident and stealthy enough not to leave any marks that forensics would have picked up."

"Well, we might be able to shed some light on that," Colby said and closely watched Don's reaction. When they had left CalSci, he and David had checked in with Don briefly to inform him about their findings, so if he thought that Nakamura shouldn't know anything about that, now was his time to speak. He didn't, so Colby went on, "Apparently, there were some workmen on CalSci's campus Monday evening that pretended to pick up the chemical waste from the chemistry and physics labs. However, according to CalSci's administration, there was nothing scheduled for Monday night. So we seem to have here two strangers who made their way through CalSci with containers large enough to contain a man, so we figure they incapacitated Charlie in his office, put him in one of those containers and left with him without anyone being the wiser."

"And you're thinking they then sat him behind his steering wheel, either unconscious or already dead, and let his car run off the road," Nakamura developed the theory further. "Does that fit the reports from the accident and the autopsy?"

"How do you know we did an autopsy on him?" Don asked and Colby could tell by the frown on his face that all his distrust at Nakamura was back.

The NSA agent, however, was looking back at him as though he had asked whether the sky was blue. "You suspected foul play, didn't you? Of course you'd do an autopsy."

Don nodded, but Colby noticed the hard stare in his eyes, and he didn't doubt for a second that his boss still didn't trust the NSA agent.

"What about those four, do you know them?" Don suddenly said and pulled four pictures from the file he was holding in his hand.

Colby craned his neck. He didn't know those four men. If he put two and two together, however, they had to be either the individuals that Larry's and Amita's analysis had revealed or suspects that Megan and Don had come across while investigating the NSA office.

Nakamura eyed the pictures with a frown on his face. "They all work for the NSA, all at our office," he said. "This one's Pete Lewis and this one is David Emerson, or Daniel Emerson, I'm not sure. I don't know the names of the other two. How come you suspect them?"

Don raised his eye-brows. "Who says we're suspecting them?"

Nakamura sighed and closed his eyes. "Alright. Let me be clear here. Either we're gonna work together or not, but this, whatever it is you're doing, this isn't working. I don't expect us to become best buddies, but for the time being it would be a nice start if you acted like you were ready to entrust me with more than a paperclip."

"So in your opinion, do we have any reason for suspecting those four?" Don asked, thoroughly ignoring what Nakamura had just said.

The NSA agent looked at him for a moment as though he was trying to read something in his mind. "And can you explain to me why I should give you an answer to that?" He shook his head, a rueful smile on his face. "You know what, if Charlie's description of you had been all I had to go on, I would have positively said that there is no way that you could be Don Eppes. But since you are and since Charlie had, who knows why, such a high opinion of you, I suppose you have your reasons for acting like a jerk. So no, I don't have any reason to suspect these four men for killing Charlie, but I hardly know them, so maybe you should start investigating for real instead of interrogating me all the time."

"We'll do that then," Don said and stood, leaving everyone else at the table confused and ill at ease.

* * *

"You've made a mistake."

Charlie jumped at the sound and heard the door fall shut. Someone had just come in, he thought it was the boss, but he had been about to fall asleep when he'd heard the words, so he couldn't tell for sure. He started lifting his head to be able to see the newcomer, but when the slight movement sent spears to the muscles in his neck, he quickly abandoned the attempt.

"What do you mean?" Tony said, the accomplice, so Charlie was relatively sure that it was the boss who had returned.

His suspicion was confirmed when Bill replied, "They're investigating, they obviously don't think it was an accident."

It took Charlie a moment to realize he had no idea what they were talking about. Tony, on the other hand, seemed to understand. "They questioned you?"

"No, but they've been asking around." He gave Charlie a sour look as though whatever had happened was somehow his fault. "His brother and another fed. They came to the office today, they were asking questions about the code and his assignment on it."

"How do you know if they didn't question you?" Tony asked.

"Look, it's the NSA, but it's still an office. People talk."

"And that's it?" Tony replied and Charlie could easily tell that he was upset. "And now you're simply assuming it's our fault that they're coming after us?"

Bill was silent for a moment and stared intently into nothing, apparently sorting through the information in his mind. When his head came up again, Charlie shuddered at seeing the look in his eyes. It was bearing even more hatred than he'd seen during their 'interrogations'.

"This was you, wasn't it?" Bill said in a low, menacing tone as he slowly drew closer to him. "You told them something, didn't you?"

Charlie was silent. He probably couldn't have said anything even if he'd wanted to, for his throat was closed up, but upholding a demeanor of calm determination was more comprehensive than simply keeping his mouth shut, and he had to restrain himself mightily to keep his gaze level and not shun away with his eyes. _Keep fighting_, he told himself, yet couldn't help but notice he had to increase his blinking rhythm. _Don't give in. Don't give them what they want._

_But he'll hurt me, _a little voice in his head said.

_You want to live_, another voice reminded him and Charlie forced himself to pay more attention to that voice and to give it room to unfold. Yes, he did want to live, that decision had been made, he couldn't question that again. And if he did want to live, he couldn't tell them, that was clear as well. He just had to remind himself that living was the right option. He had to remind himself that it was just pain, that it would stop eventually. The team would find him and the pain would stop, so choosing life was the right thing. Colby had chosen life too when he'd been held by the Chinese, and it had been the right thing, they had gotten him out, the team had been there to rescue him. The team would come for him as well, he just had to hold out until they were here, that's what Colby would tell him, that's what they all would tell him to do, they all would tell him to keep fighting, to not give in, so that was what he needed to do. He couldn't let them down, for they weren't going to let him down either.

"DIDN'T YOU?"

Charlie flinched at the loud voice, and a second later, an explosion of pain seemed to bust his head open. There was white light at first, then dark splotches, and a metallic taste in his mouth that was making him sick.

"What did you tell them?" the shouting went on somewhere, although Charlie had trouble localizing the voice. Gradually, however, the black splotches in his field of vision cleared. A blow to the head. Bill had hit his head, he was becoming more careless, he was losing his temper, he was doing things he had avoided doing until now. That couldn't be good.

Before he'd fully regained orientation and examined the implications more deeply though, an arm was pressed against his throat, pushing his head back so far that it hurt in his neck, and he was forced to stare at Bill's face that was inches from his own. "Tell us what you told them, and whom. And I'm warning you, if you keep lying to us, you know what we can do to you, and you can rest assured that everything that's happened until now will seem like kindergarten to you."

Charlie tried to take deeper breaths, to get rid of the tremble, and give his voice a deep, steady sound. He wasn't coming very close, but he chose to blame that on the arm pressed against his larynx and not on his own confusion and fear. "I never lied to you."

Bill let go of his throat then and Charlie could see in his eyes that he remembered, that he realized that Charlie was indeed telling the truth. When they'd first questioned him, they'd asked whether anyone knew about what he had figured out, and after thinking for a moment, Charlie had opted to say yes. It hadn't seemed wise to make them think that he was the only one who knew about their crimes. However, when he hadn't revealed whom he had informed about what he knew, they had assumed him to be lying, and Charlie had decided to let them believe that, suddenly afraid that they might find out about Don's involvement otherwise and do something to him, or to Taro and Bob.

"Stop being such a smart-ass," Bill snarled. "So who did you tell, and what?"

Charlie felt his breathing accelerate and made sure he wasn't going to bite his lip when the next blow would hit, but otherwise fought hard not to show any reaction and, above all, to keep his mouth shut.

_It's just pain. It'll pass._

The punch came, less forceful this time, but still painful. "What did you tell them?" Bill repeated, but didn't even leave him time to respond before another blow hit him, leaving him disoriented for a couple of seconds so that he couldn't have said anything coherent even if he'd wanted to.

"Fine, you know what, it doesn't matter," Bill said when Charlie still wouldn't open his mouth, but he was saying the words with a tone that Charlie, despite his disorientation, knew that he definitely didn't like.

His premonitions were soon confirmed. "Let's get him back up. You're gonna make him talk and then we'll get rid of him as fast as we can."

"_I'm_ gonna make him talk?" Tony repeated. "What about you?"

"I'm gonna pay a visit to his brother, figure out what exactly he knows."

Charlie felt as though his heart had stopped beating. "No," he whispered.

Bill looked at him then and on his face, a grin appeared that sent shivers down Charlie's spine. He turned around fully and slowly came towards him, never breaking eye contact.

"Hit a nerve there, haven't I?" he taunted, his voice low and filled with mock innocence. "Scared of what I might gonna do to your precious brother, aren't you?"

Charlie pressed his lips together, afraid he might say something to make things even worse than they were, and tried to read in the other man's eyes what he was going to do to them, to Don. Bill's grin widened and then he turned away towards the door.

"No!" Charlie called after him before he could stop himself. He could feel that he was making a mistake, yet he couldn't stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth. "Don't hurt him!"

Bill had halted, his hand on the door handle, but still didn't turn around and instead remained standing there, waiting.

"Please," Charlie whispered, fighting against the choked sensation in his throat. He knew he'd just shown them his hand, that he'd ruined it all by revealing they could use Don as leverage, but there was no way to change that back, so what did it matter now? All that mattered was minimizing the damage, making sure that they _wouldn't_ use Don as leverage, and if he had to resort to begging for that, so be it. "Please don't hurt him."

Bill turned around then, slowly, a lenient smile on his face that didn't fool Charlie for an instant. "And what exactly are you willing to do in exchange?"

Charlie looked at him, breathing hard, and knew he had lost, for they knew the answer already. "Anything."


	12. The Monsters Lurking in the Dark

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1  
**A/N:** Thanks a lot for your comments! They are very much appreciated.

* * *

**Chapter 12: The Monsters Lurking in the Dark**

"What was that?"

Don rolled his eyes, but didn't stop as he strode towards his cubicle. Too bad the way from the conference room was pretty short, so Megan soon had a chance to catch up with him.

"Oh, so we are not even discussing this anymore?" she continued ranting at him.

"Discuss what?" he shot back, even though he knew exactly what she was getting at.

"You know what," she told him outright. "You can't just use Nakamura like this and keep everything we know from him."

"And why shouldn't I?"

"Because we're supposed to be a _team, _Don. If we want his help, if we want to work together with him, we need to be able to trust each other, and that's a two-way street."

Don couldn't explain exactly why he was experiencing what he was feeling, he only knew that Megan's words made him angry.

"Now listen to me," he hissed. "Nakamura isn't a part of this team by a long shot, he's a tool to get Charlie back, and that's it."

She wasn't backing down. Instead, she was getting more upset as well. "We need to trust each other if we want to figure out who's behind all this! We need someone within the NSA, and we can't hope to get anywhere with all these lies and hiding things!"

Don closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, but his anger wasn't going away. "Alright Megan, I'm gonna say this once, so listen closely. We are _not_ going to tell Nakamura what we know, and we are _not _going to let him be part of this. You know very well that we can't trust anybody, so nobody, you hear me, _nobody_ is going to be entrusted with what we know." He made sure there wasn't anybody close by to overhear them before he added in a low voice, almost in a growl, "If the wrong people learn we're onto them, or that we know that Charlie's still alive, he's as good as dead. Now you either agree with me over not running any risk to get him killed, or I'll make sure you won't get in our way. So take your pick now, which one is it?"

Megan was staring at him as though she was seeing him for the first time and Don could feel that he had just broken something, even though he wasn't sure what it was. He didn't care, though, not at this moment. Protecting his brother was his priority now, everything else he was doing had to serve this purpose.

"Fine," Megan said eventually, looking him steadily in the eye. "You're the boss."

* * *

Charlie was breathing hard. He could feel that he wasn't getting enough oxygen on the long run, so he tried to take deeper breaths, but it wasn't that easy. His chest felt as though it was clad in iron, an iron belt that was heated and shrinking on top of that, and he knew that he needed to get rid of this, he needed to calm himself down and get rid of the panic if he wanted to breathe again.

Too bad his mind was telling him that he had every reason for panicking. He'd made a mistake. He should have never let them know that they could use Don as leverage. Charlie's very attempt to protect his brother had been what had put him at risk in the first place. He'd screwed up, he'd made a mistake, and this wasn't just a matter of erasing the flawed string of symbols and write a new one, this was a matter of life and death.

And yet, that wasn't the first mistake he'd committed. If he hadn't written that email to Don, his brother wouldn't have become caught up in this mess and consequently wouldn't be in danger now. So not only had Charlie sprung the trap, he'd also been the one who'd led his brother inside. Then again, Charlie had felt like he had to do that, he'd had to let his brother know what was going on. Telling him in person hadn't been an option, because firstly he hadn't been allowed to tell anyone, and secondly that way Don would have become caught up in this mess as well, and for certain. Writing that email had been some sort of a compromise, because he'd confided in Don only as a last resort while still not betraying confidential information.

However, as he realized now, the compromise had been a bad one, for it really went against both reasons that had prevented him from personally telling Don in the first place, for this way, not only had he violated his confidentiality restrictions, but it had also been a sure way to drag Don into this mess without telling him enough to let him know what he was up against. Yes, it might have worked pretty well as a safety measure, but as a method to let Don know what Charlie thought he deserved to know, it had been a pretty lousy solution.

Before he could dwell longer on his past actions, Bill was back, putting an opened laptop in front of his nose. "Let's get right to it then, I assume you're acquainted enough with the code so we can jump right into it. So I can see that in these lines here we're creating sixteen random numbers with eight digits each," he said, pointing at the lines in question with his finger. "I'm not clear on how exactly those numbers enter the code later and what exactly you need them for. I mean, they're not prime, like those large numbers you create here, at least not all of them, so I can't see their use for the encryption."

Charlie thought feverishly. His panic was still there, still making him feel hot and short of breath, but somehow, the lines in front of him managed to level him a little, they gave him something else his mind could busy itself with, a neat little problem to solve. He knew he had to say something in order to keep Bill from focusing on Don, but what? There was no sense in lying, because obviously Bill understood enough of the matter to tell lies from the truth more or less instantly, and if he spotted a lie, there was a chance that they would lash out at him in anger, either at him or at Don or at anyone else they thought might be a good target to make him come out with the truth. If, on the other hand, he told them the true purpose of those numbers, if he started to actually reveal the code's workings to them, all would be lost, but at least they wouldn't need Don anymore as leverage.

"Hey!" Bill said and Charlie flinched, for the other man had tried to get his attention not only by addressing him, but also by slapping him in the face. "I'm talking to you here."

Charlie swallowed and tried to concentrate on him, to think of something to say. He couldn't, though. Concentrating wasn't working, not like this, not when he was afraid of what they might do to him, afraid of what they might do to others. True, his cheek had already stopped burning and was merely tingling, the slap hadn't been performed with much force, but it had held an element of surprise that seemed even more problematic than the physical pain he was experiencing. They were having the upper hand, they were the ones who could control the situation, who could change it from one second to the next, so he had to make sure that they wouldn't change it for the worse.

"Now listen to me," Bill hissed and suddenly had him by his throat, pressing his forearm against Charlie's larynx. Charlie gasped, or he wanted to, but there was no air coming in. "You're going to tell me what the deal with that code is _now, _or I'm gonna go straight to your precious brother and knock his lights out."

"You can't do that," Charlie croaked when Bill had released his grip a little. He could feel his eyes burn, he felt sick with fear. "Please."

"Tell me what I want to know, and we won't hurt him."

The promise sounded so tempting, the solution to his problems so simple, that Charlie had already opened his mouth to give his consent and start his explanation. His voice was gone though, the fear was crippling his tongue, and a second later he thought that maybe that was a good thing. He couldn't just tell them, he needed to think this through. Despite everything, he needed to keep his head, he needed to be practical about this. Assuming he told them about the code, what was going to happen? They were going to kill him. But then what would happen to Don? They had promised to leave him alone then, but what guarantee did he have that they would be true to their word? After all, they had kidnapped him, they had beaten him, they were extorting him with Don's life, so they weren't exactly the most trust-worthy people he'd met.

So how would giving them the code keep Don safe? After all, they were threatening to hurt him because he was getting too close to them, and since Don already thought him to be dead, Charlie's death wouldn't change that, Don would still be looking for them, so his kidnappers (or murderers by then) would still want to do away with him. So if his reasoning was correct, nothing would be accomplished by giving in to his kidnappers' demands, on the contrary. Once he told them about the code, he wouldn't have any leverage left, and once he was dead, there was no way for him to control the outcome of this whole mess, so there would be no way to keep Don safe.

"How will you guarantee me that?" Charlie croaked and tried giving his voice a steady, determined tone. He failed utterly. The hoarse whisper sounded small and whining.

"We won't. You got our word, that's all you're gonna get," Bill said impatiently.

"Then I won't tell you," Charlie said, still not able to accompany the determination of his words with an appropriate tone of his voice, and already braced himself for further slaps or blows or punches. He was doing the right thing though, he just had to keep telling himself that he was doing the right thing. He'd already dragged Don into this, the least he could do now was try and keep him safe. It was the right thing, he needed to accept this as his final decision. "As long as I can't be sure you won't hurt him afterwards, I'm not gonna give you what you want."

The facial slap that followed let him flinch and made his eyes burn, but left him with a feeling that this could have gone much worse.

"You stupid son of a bitch," he heard Bill mutter as he walked away and he had to fight hard not to utter a sigh of relief. They were leaving him alone, and they couldn't hurt Don without risking losing his insight on that code forever, so everything had worked out perfectly.

Right?

He shuddered. It had been the right decision, hadn't it? His reasoning was sound, telling them about the code was no option, so he'd had to defy them. This was the correct way to keep Don safe, right?

On the other hand, if he'd made them angry enough, wasn't there a chance that they would lash out at Don after all?

* * *

Don climbed wearily behind the steering-wheel of his SUV and closed his eyes. For a moment, he just sat there, wondering if he could allow himself to go home. It was only 7 pm now, but they had nothing to do until they heard back from either Thompkins to get more information about the four suspects Amita and Larry had pointed out, or from their technicians and forensics, so he'd better use the time he had to get some badly needed rest.

Did he have that time though? Charlie was probably being held somewhere, and who knew in what condition he was. Sure, his kidnappers seemed to prefer having him alive instead of dead, but that did by no means ensure Charlie's well-being.

He sighed and turned on the ignition. Second-guessing his decisions wasn't helpful, it would only slow them down and keep his thoughts on things that for the most part couldn't be changed anyway while he should put all his efforts and energy into making the right decisions from the get-go, the decisions that would bring his brother back to them.

He was aware that his team members were starting to question some of the bigger decisions he'd made, like keeping Nakamura out of the loop, but in that regard Don wasn't deterred. The fewer people knew that Charlie was still alive – and that they knew that he was –, the smaller the risk that his kidnappers would find it necessary to kill him, that was what mattered most.

As he turned from a larger into a smaller street, he frowned. That black Ford had been behind him ever since he'd left the FBI, or at least so he thought, even though there had always been two or three cars between them in the beginning.

Don felt heat rising to his head, like a hunting fever. True, if his suspicions were correct, he was the one being hunted, but if that was so, he had every intention to turn the tables, and if they did this properly, if they managed to get a hold of whoever was following him, they might soon have a suspect on their hands and with it, finally, a promising lead.

He noticed that his hand was trembling with adrenaline as he pulled out his cell. He waited until he'd made another turn and the black Ford followed, then he called David.

"I think I'm being followed," was the first thing he said as soon as his friend had picked up the phone. "Get Megan and Colby and meet me at Charlie's house, but make sure he doesn't see you until you've made sure he can't get away." He added a description of the car, including the license plate, and when David had reassured him they'd be there as soon as possible, he hung up again, trying to calm himself down and hide his agitation. He had almost reached Charlie's house now and as soon as he got out, he had to act as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

He forced himself not to turn around or let it show that every muscle in his body was tense as he stepped up towards the front door of his childhood home. From the corner of his eye, he could see that the black Ford had parked some dozen yards down the street, still in view, but at a great enough distance that a casual bystander probably wouldn't have noticed the disruption of normalcy.

As soon as he was inside and the door was closed behind him, he took a look through the peephole, but nothing could be seen; his follower seemed to still be in his car and as far as Don had been able to tell, he was alone.

"Dad?" he called out. "Did you happen to notice anything out of the ordinary today?"

"Hello to you, too," his father answered as he slowly came down the stairs. Don couldn't help but shrink back a little when he noticed how old his dad looked, much older than he'd looked last week. His tone was no different. Where there should have been reproach detectable or even some kind of humor, all Don could hear was weariness and anxiety.

"What kind of question is that anyway?" his dad asked, making Don refocus on the problem at hand.

"Do you think someone may have been watching you, or the house?" he questioned his dad.

He frowned. "No. That is, I didn't notice anything. Why do you ask? Is something wrong?"

The worry had increased, so Don tried to lessen it. "I don't think so, but we'll soon find out."

His father didn't look convinced.

"Don't worry, Dad. Just…" Okay, he didn't want his dad to worry, but he didn't want to put him at risk either if there was actually something about to go down. "I mean, maybe you should stay upstairs for a while. The team is going to drop by later, so… you know."

He let the phrase hang in the air and tried not to bow under his father's stern gaze.

"Alright," his dad said eventually, very slowly, making the words sound like a warning. He was already halfway up the stairs when he stood, his head bent down. "I can be certain though that you're being careful, right?"

Don swallowed hard. "Of course, Dad."

His father's serious eyes lingered on him for a second or two. "Good," he then said and with tired limbs, trudged back upstairs, probably into Charlie's room.

Don gazed after him for a moment, but didn't have time to wonder if in all his efforts to find his brother, he was being fair to his father, because at that moment, his cellphone rang and David informed him that he, Colby and Megan had arrived and were now planning to near the car in question from both up and down the street.

Following the plan he'd quickly worked out with his team, Don left the house and went straight for his car as though he was searching something in the glove compartment. This way, he could use the car as a cover that would prevent the spy from noticing that Don was watching him in return. Besides, it would also be a nice cover in case that bullets were about to fly, something that Don didn't want to rule out categorically.

As soon as he was in place, Megan and David were nearing the black car from two opposing sides, while Colby was coming from the same direction as David, yet walking on the opposite side of the street. Don tried to get a good look at the driver, but the reflection on the windshield didn't allow for that.

Whoever this guy was, however, he was quick-witted. Megan could hardly be seen from his perspective, especially since it was getting dark, when he started his engine. Before he had gone as much as an inch though, Don's whole team had already pulled their weapons and were blocking his way.

Some tense seconds passed while they were drawing nearer and telling the person in the car to get out slowly and show their hands. Then, the headlights were turned off, and while their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they still couldn't see who it was that was sitting behind the steering-wheel. Then the man got out, slowly, just like they had asked him to.

"You know," he said when he was standing next to his car, his hands held beside his head, "I have to say I'm getting a little tired of being treated like a criminal."

Don frowned and lowered his gun, yet only slightly, trying to make some sense of this. Agent Nakamura was about the last person he would have expected to see.


	13. Joint Forces

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1

* * *

**Chapter 13: Joint Forces**

"What are you doing here?" Don asked, his voice hard. He had tightened the grip on his gun again. Now that the moment of surprise had passed, his distrust at Nakamura was back to its old force. That fellow had a tendency to show up unexpected, and Don didn't like it one bit.

Nakamura's voice was calm and clear when he replied, "I'm investigating Charlie's death."

"So what are you doing _here_?"

The other man looked at him closely for a second with a stare that Don couldn't quite interpret. "You really can't think of a reason?"

"Why do you think I'm asking?"

Nakamura eyed the rest of Don's team before his gaze landed on him again. Very quietly, he said, "I took a step back and wondered who might benefit from Charlie's death, and a name popped up: yours."

For a moment, Don was so dumbfounded that he didn't understand. The sentences that Nakamura was saying were without logic, without any form of coherence. Then, however, he understood, or at least he thought he did, and he felt his anger boil. "Are you serious?"

"Very. And I promise you, if I'm right and you really killed him, I'm going to find enough evidence to nail you." He turned back to his car and opened the door, thoroughly ignoring the guns still pointed at him. "It's been just as nice a pleasure as always."

He was just about to get on the driver's seat when a voice held him back, "Hold on!"

Surprised, they all turned around to Megan.

"This is insane," she went on. "We should work on this together instead of suspecting each other and getting into each other's way."

"Oh, so we're back to working together now?" Nakamura asked sarcastically, still standing at his opened car door. "Sorry, but that ship has sailed."

"I also don't –"

"Just think, Don!" Megan interrupted him. "He might be able to help us. In any case he's going to hinder us as soon as he actually starts investigating you. You really want to risk being held or not allowed to move around freely?"

"But he's bluffing! He knows I don't have any reason to hurt Charlie, let alone kill him!"

"Are you sure?" Nakamura asked coolly, an antipole to Don's heated anger. "I mean, aside from the fact that there might have been some sibling rivalry going on that often comes along with some sort of hatred –"

"You have no –" Don threw in, but Nakamura wouldn't let himself get interrupted.

"You're also the one who benefits most from Charlie's death financially," he ended calmly.

Don laughed out in incredulity. "What? You can't be serious! You don't actually think I would kill my brother over money!"

"Why not? With all the consulting on the side, Charlie was a fairly wealthy man, and according to his will, he left most of his belongings to you. The house alone should be worth a little fortune, and then you're also the main beneficiary of his life insurance. People have been killed for a lot less."

Don was staring at him, lacking understanding. He wanted to give Nakamura a sharp retort, but his mind was still reeling with the other agent's words. Charlie had made a will? In his favor no less?

Why didn't he know about that?

More to the point, why did Nakamura know about that?

"You're lying," Don said. "How would you even know if Charlie –"

"It's called investigating, Agent Eppes," Nakamura cut him off. "You should try it sometimes."

"Alright," Megan interfered, "I think that's enough. We should all just –"

"That still doesn't explain what you're doing here," Don said, thoroughly ignoring his co-worker. He could feel his anger at Nakamura grow, a burning sensation in his guts that was firing up to his head, making it difficult for him to control it.

"Doesn't it?" Nakamura asked and Don hated him even more for his annoying habit of asking rhetorical questions. "And what do you normally do when you've got a suspect and want to find further proof for his guilt?"

Don wanted to laugh Nakamura's explanation off, but found that he was too angry at him to even fake laughter. "So you were waiting for what? That I'd meet with some sinister guy that helped me stage the accident?"

"Have you?"

Now the laugh did escape his throat, or at least something close to laughter. Could be interpreted as an exasperated groan as well though. "This is ridiculous! And what about that whole NSA crap, I just made that up or what?"

"No, but the timing could have been a mere coincidence. Or, which is the solution that I am leaning towards, when Charlie told you about the possible leak, you used that opportunity to set everyone on the wrong track. All you had to do then was pretend you didn't know a thing about the NSA case."

Don was shaking his head. He was still inclined to laugh this off, but something in Nakamura's expression kept him from doing so. His features were very stern and serious, and Don thought that underneath all that facade of calmness, he could see some kind of anger as well. "You're serious, aren't you?" He was looking into Nakamura's eyes that were silently staring back at him, scrutinizing him, two relentless charcoal lenses watching his every move. "You actually believe I'm in this somehow?"

For a moment, the charcoals seemed to be glowing up with a flash of anger, but the flicker was gone immediately. What remained was a stare so cold that Don, despite himself, felt shivers run down his spine. "I have to admit, you fooled me at first," Nakamura said in a voice that was matching his stare, "though in my defense, I have to say that I was probably biased by the image Charlie painted of you. But I guess that image was never matching reality. Family members tend to have an idealized and distorted notion of each other. In the end, it was your behavior that didn't make sense and that gave you away."

Don tore his gaze away from those cold charcoals, turning to his team for support. He was sick of this, he just wanted Nakamura to shut up and leave, but he didn't know how to make him and his theories go away. "He's nuts," he said, but without much conviction. As much as he hated admitting it, he couldn't think of any logical arguments to counter the other agent's accusations.

Megan was suddenly next to him and said, very quietly, "You have to admit, Don, from an outside perspective, you have been acting pretty strangely these last couple of days."

"Oh, have I?" it burst out of Don. He didn't know what was happening here. Were they all going insane? Or was he the one who had lost his mind? To be honest, that wouldn't surprise him. He'd managed just barely to keep it together these last couple of days. First the notice of Charlie's death, then the suspicion that he had been killed, then the knowledge that he was out there somewhere, alive, but in serious danger. Don had been running on nothing but grief and worry, supplemented by a mix of insufficient sleep and food, and he could feel that he was losing it. And if he was honest with himself, he had to admit that he already had lost it. He'd lost control over his temper several times already, and even though he was always trying to make the best decision, to do whatever was needed to get Charlie back, he had serious doubts that he was doing a very good job at it. He was doing the best he could though, and the combination of those two facts, resulting in the conviction that his best efforts were not enough to master this crisis and bring his brother back, were fueling the despair he could feel smoldering in his guts.

"Look, Don," Megan went on quietly and lightly touched his arm, "all I'm saying is that from his perspective, you're indeed a viable suspect, and maybe he has found other viable suspects as well, suspects that might actually lead us somewhere. I really think it would be best to combine our efforts. Besides, if he wants to hold you, I suppose he has enough circumstantial evidence to do that, and… well, we can't allow ourselves being one man short."

Don pressed his lips together and turned away from her, as though he could find the answer floating around somewhere. He caught a glimpse of Colby's and David's faces and in them, he could read the same request that Megan had just voiced. So maybe this was the answer, maybe this was how he could improve the outcome of what he thought to be his best efforts, by trusting his team.

"Alright," he said in a slightly erratic manner, still nervous whether this might not be a mistake after all, yet knowing that this needed to be done, that they were running out of options. "Let's go in Charlie's garage."

* * *

Either Nakamura was an outstanding actor (a possibility that Don didn't want to completely exclude just yet), or he really hadn't known that Charlie had been kidnapped rather than killed. When they had told him the main points of interest that they had learned in this investigation, he still seemed rather incredulous.

"So you're sure?" he asked with that kind of cautious distrust that Don had become so familiar with. "He's alive?"

"Well, at least that's our working hypothesis," Don replied and grimaced. His brother had become so omnipresent in his thoughts that he was starting to talk like him. One more reason to get him back as soon as possible. "So if that's the case," he continued quickly, "can you think of anyone who might have pulled this off?"

Nakamura was shaking his head slowly, apparently still trying to digest the news. "What about those prepaid cell-phones your murder victim received calls from? Where are they logged in now?" he asked eventually. "They could give us some –"

Don impatiently shook his head. "They've been dead, one of them two months or so before Bourgeois's murder, the other one directly afterwards, that doesn't help us."

Nakamura stared thoughtfully ahead and then said slowly, "I mean it seems as though our first idea's correct, doesn't it? We're looking for someone within the NSA who's willing to leak information."

"And do you know someone like that?"

"Well, I got some names. I haven't finished checking them out though since I… Well, I followed that other lead instead."

"Meaning me," Don said, still not sure what to think about Nakamura's earlier accusations.

Nakamura was regarding his folded hands, then looked up at him. "I'm sorry. Apparently I was dead wrong and I… well, I don't think I chose my words very wisely back there. I'm sorry for insulting you."

Don nodded and bit his lip. Somehow, he couldn't look the other agent in the eye. "Don't sweat it," he mumbled quietly and felt his face burning. He was eager to go on and leave this awkward moment behind, but somehow he couldn't, he had to get this off his chest first. "It's not like I've been very amenable either these past few days. I guess we all said some things we're not proud of."

The heat in his head was increasing and his throat was suddenly dry. Oh yes, he'd made some pretty stupid moves lately. Sometimes, it had felt as though he was standing beside himself, just watching what that stubborn fed was doing and more than once annoyed at his inability to work together with others. Social interaction was beyond his power these days though, for it required emotional intelligence, and right now, all he could do with his emotion was lock it up deep inside himself. He couldn't open that Pandora's Box, not if he wanted to keep a clear head, and that was what he needed to get his brother back.

He cleared his throat. "So anyway, who are your suspects and why do you suspect them?"

Before Nakamura answered, he emitted a deep sigh. "Alright," he said eventually, "I can give you the names, but I can't explain to you what makes me suspect them."

"And why not?" Colby asked icily. His tone was so dismissive that it made Don turn around to look at him. He drew his eye-brows together. He'd thought that he himself was mistrustful of Nakamura, but the stony features on Colby's face made him wonder if his colleague might be even more suspicious of the NSA agent than him. The look in Colby's eyes was hard and his mouth was thin, there was no doubt that he was resenting the man.

Nakamura eyed him levelly. "I guess Agent Eppes was right earlier. We have all done things in this matter that we're not proud of."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Nakamura sighed again. "Look, I didn't exactly play by the book to get those names, okay?" Since Don and his team were still looking at him expectantly, he felt compelled to go on, "My… Well, let's just say I know someone in HR who helped me gather the necessary information, and I may have used my status as an agent without having an official cause or even warrants to get all the data."

"What information are we talking about?"

"I was looking for somebody who might hold a grudge against the agency. The tests you have to pass in order to get into the NSA are quite demanding, and they include quite thoroughgoing background and loyalty checks. I figured that if someone decided to renunciate that loyalty by leaking information, there might have been noticeable problems accompanied with that decision, like being denied a substantial promotion, or being made the scapegoat for a scandal, or being thrown off track by a personal tragedy." He pulled a sheet of paper from the inner pocket of his jacket and unfolded it. "I came up with these twelve names, and before you ask, none of them show up on the list you showed me earlier today. I have gone through the first four and haven't found anything of significance, but I have to admit, I only scratched the surface. If they went through bigger trouble to hide their tracks, they could have very possibly fooled me." His face suddenly lit up. "But we could compare their data to the GSM data of that prepaid cellphone you mentioned! If the owner of that cell-phone had something to do with the murder and the leak –"

"It's of no use," Don interrupted him, thoroughly unable to listen to his hopeful tone. "Whenever that prepaid cell was turned on, which was rarely enough, it was always getting its signals from the cell towers surrounding the NSA office, so that still doesn't tell us which agent is foul. No, we need to do this differently."

The FBI agents exchanged glances and silently came to the conclusion that David voiced, "We should show your list to our consultants. They tend to find ways to sort through mountains of data really efficiently, they might be a big help with this."

"If you want mountains of data," Nakamura said and pulled the next gift he'd brought from his trouser pocket, "you can have this. I copied on it all sorts of data – personal data, debt collection information, banking information – of all my suspects. Maybe your guys can find something in all that." He handed Don the flash drive and put his hands back in his pockets. "I'm afraid that's all I've come up with," he ended a little despondently. "Ever since today, I didn't follow any other lead but you."

Don averted his gaze and fought to control his facial expressions so that he wouldn't grimace with pain, for it did hurt him to hear Nakamura's words. He himself and his team too, they had lost a lot of time chasing shadows, Nakamura's shadow to be exact, so it seemed that even though they had all been looking for Charlie, none of them had used the time they didn't even have to begin with very wisely.

David stood and Don was hit by a wave of gratitude when he saw him pull out his cell. David was someone he could rely on to do the job, even in a situation like this when the whole world had crumbled down and seemed to be ruled by chaos. "I'm going to call Larry and Amita then," David said and went looking for a quieter place, not knowing the great service he was doing Don by simply doing his job as usual.

* * *

When they had all been sent home by Don after the abruptly terminated and less than fruitful briefing with Nakamura, Amita's plan had been to make a quick stop at her apartment in order to have a quick shower and get a change of clothes before heading straight back to Charlie's house to check on Alan and continue trying to find some answers. After the shower, however, she'd been so exhausted that she'd decided to lay down on the couch for just a moment, only ten minutes to recharge her batteries.

Now, however, she found herself awakened by a sound that at first, she didn't quite know where to place. It took her an unusual amount of time to figure out that it was her cellphone that was ringing before she hastened to answer it, her tiredness forgotten.

"Hey, Amita, sorry to bother you," David greeted her and she was struck by the feeling that his words seemed odd. Being bothered seemed to require that she was doing something during which she could be bothered, but what would that have been? Talking to David, being connected to the search for Charlie, was the only thing worth doing to her, more than that, it was the lifeline she needed to keep herself above water.

"What is it?" she asked and realized how frantic she was sounding, so she forced herself to take deeper breaths, hoping that would slow her heartbeat down a little. "Did you find anything?"

"We have some new leads," David said, but the caution in his tone kept her from nurturing too much hope. "I'm afraid we're gonna need your help to sort through the data, otherwise it might take us days to get something substantial out of it."

That was all that Amita needed to hear to make her practically bolt out of the door. Not even half an hour later, she and Larry were entering Charlie's garage with a mixture of apprehension and drive.

"You have new leads?" Amita asked even before Larry had closed the door behind them. She glanced back nervously when the door fell shut with a thud that made it seem as though she had just been locked in a dungeon. A shudder ran down her spine and she was assailed once again by the same feelings she had experienced the last time when she had been here, in Charlie's garage, when she and Larry had meant to enhance the security footage, last night. Had it really only been last night? Their frantic search for answers after having learned that Charlie was still alive seemed to be so far in the past because so much had happened since then, but at the same time, when Amita thought about how little progress they had made since then, the hours seemed to have rushed by in a disembodied vortex to which they couldn't hold on.

She tried to swallow down the feeling of panic that threatened to rise from her guts to her head, but she found that she had more difficulty doing that than she would have expected. After all, she knew that Charlie was still alive, and she knew that they had to focus on their task in order to get him back. Still, she couldn't stop herself from being captured by the memory of how she'd stood here three days ago, after they had learned about Charlie's death. The grief still seemed palpable, the sorrow was still sitting in her stomach like a heavy, leaden weight paralyzing her and making her nauseous and lethargic.

So she could hardly wait to cover up those thoughts and feelings, to become active again and finally make some progress on their search for Charlie. At the same time, however, she felt overwhelmed by everything that was going on, it felt like she didn't have enough time to process the sensations rushing in at her, her memories of the past week, her thoughts and feelings of the present, and now this somehow conspiratorial meeting in Charlie's garage with its somewhat motley participants, two scientists, three FBI agents, that NSA agent and, standing near the door with his arms crossed before his chest, one tense and worried-looking father.

"We have twelve new suspects that seem worth checking out," David explained and Amita forced herself to block the other thoughts and sensations out and focus on him. "We have a lot of data, including data from their bank accounts. We started going through them, but haven't found anything of interest yet, but we thought you might know a way to go through the data faster or see things that we may be missing."

"Because you think that whoever kidnapped Charlie gained financially for selling the information he got over the phone lines," Amita ended his thought. Then she turned around to Larry with sudden excitement, for this was something they could actually do, this was applied mathematics in its purest form! "We could find fits for each bank account and then simply determine the one with the largest SSR!"

"Hold on," Colby interrupted them while Amita was already setting up her laptop. "Now what's that in English?"

"We are trying to find the bank account of someone with abnormal spending behavior," Larry explained with a patience that Amita couldn't find these days. "To do that, we are going to find trigonometric polynomials, trigonometric since the earnings and expenses of the average person are best described by a periodic function. To find the right function for each bank account, we are going to change the parameters of our polynomial until they fit the actual data points, that is the amount of money on that bank account at a given point of time, as well as possible, and to figure out which polynomial is best with no further optimization possible, we examine the sum of squared residuals, or SSR, that is we determine the difference between the value of the data point and the value of our model and multiply that number by itself so that when we sum up all those differences, it doesn't matter whether the value of our polynomial is higher or lower than the value of the data point. Now, usually people have a relatively regular spending behavior and therefore there exists a trigonometric polynomial that fits the data points well, that is the sum of squared residuals will be fairly small. If, however, someone has an irregular income, as can be expected when he or she irregularly sells information gained in a clandestine manner, the sum of squared residuals even of the best polynomial we can find for that bank account can be expected to be much higher."

For a moment, there was only silence, which Amita hardly took notice of while she sorted through the data from Agent Nakamura's flash drive. Eventually, she could hear Colby mutter, "You call that English?", but before Larry had a chance to reply, the door was opened and Amita allowed herself to look up from her laptop.

"Found it," Megan said as she entered the door with two further laptops in her arms. While she greeted them, she gave Colby some keys that Amita guessed belonged to his apartment, so apparently Megan had been gone to get both her and Colby's laptops to enable them to work more efficiently. "With Alan's, Agent Nakamura's and Charlie's old laptop, I think we're fully equipped now," Megan immediately confirmed her hunch. "So I guess we'll continue sorting through the personal data of the agents from Agent Nakamura's list?"

Her words were met with consent and she started putting the laptops up just as Alan quietly went inside, mumbling to get some further extension cords. Suddenly struck by the unreality of the situation, Amita frowned. At first glance, this might have looked like some over 30s LAN party, and it only now hit her how strange this was. Why all this cloak and dagger, why weren't they examining this data at the FBI office? Sure, they had to be careful not to let anyone look over their shoulders, but that hadn't stopped them from working there before. What had happened? Or was it… Amita eyed the data on her laptop screen. That was a lot of data, from a lot of people, a kind of data they normally didn't have access to. Was it possible that they were using this data without the necessary warrants?

Impatiently, she shook her head and decided not to waste her time pondering the question of where the data had come from. They finally _had_ data, that was what she had to focus on, they finally had a lead, and she'd be damned if she wouldn't make good use of that.


	14. The Relativity of Time

**Disclaimer: **see chapter 1  
**A/N:** Thank you for your comments! They help me making sure I didn't overlook some logic error.

* * *

**Chapter 14: The Relativity of Time**

"We found something," Amita said and David looked up from his laptop (well, Charlie's old one, actually). "We finished the analysis, and there's only one bank account that stands out. It belongs to one Agent Connell."

"You finished?" Colby asked a little incredulously and took a look at his watch. David too raised his eye-brows. The scientists had arrived a mere two hours ago.

"It's a very basic application," Amita explained while they gathered behind her and Larry to see the screen. She showed them the account movements and graphs of their fits, and once she had explained to them what they were seeing, David could grasp the difference between Connell's account and the other agents' accounts as well.

"His balance is pretty low though," Colby noted with a frown. "If we were right in assuming that he sold the information he leaked, wouldn't he have to have more money on his bank account than that?"

"Not necessarily," Larry explained. "You see, we only know about the official accounts, but if those show such a high degree of irregularity as this one, it's likely that this Agent Connell has other assets that we don't know of and which he uses to pay expenses that otherwise would have been cleared with the money from his official bank accounts, which would have given them a more regular curve."

"Alright," David said and decided that it was at least worth checking out this lead, "so what do we know about this Agent Connell?"

That was Nakamura's cue and he turned back to his own computer to inform them what his research had yielded. "He has money problems and had been fighting in a legal war both against his health insurance company and against the NSA as his employer. Apparently, his wife became ill seven, no, eight years ago and had to undergo a series of multiple, often quite expensive treatments. The insurance company wouldn't cover the expenses."

"Why not?" Megan asked.

"I'm not sure. My guess is that they claimed that the treatment wasn't medically necessary, for if I'm getting this right, they never found out what her condition was. It started with organ failure, first the kidneys, then the liver, then the thyroid and the spleen. In the end, she had a bout of meningitis that she never recovered from."

"She's dead?" Colby asked.

Nakamura nodded. "She was in a coma for nine months before they turned off the machines. That was almost a year ago." He pulled up another list. "Connell had great expenses over the years. They had to mortgage their house and get several other loans which he still hasn't paid back."

"So he can definitely use the money," Colby threw in.

"And he may also be willing to screw his employer for that," Nakamura added. "Over the years, he applied for a sabbatical several times in order to be able to spend more time with his wife, but was always turned down. He'd been negotiating with HR quite a lot until it all stopped when his wife died. I imagine he wasn't very happy with the agency's way to support him in all this."

"He's looking good for this," David agreed. "We should figure out where he might be holding Charlie if he's actually behind this. Maybe at his house?"

Nakamura shook his head. "They had to sell the house three years ago, I assume they had to downsize due to their financial problems. In that light, I don't think he's got a lot of property, but it's sure worth checking out. We should also check property his relatives might hold, especially his parents and in-laws."

That they did. It turned out that Connell's father did indeed hold some property, namely a small house in the suburbs he inhabited with his wife. Even more interesting however seemed the fact that an uncle of Connell's wife was the registered owner of an out-of-use farm near Lancaster and thus of a remote location that was still reasonably close to the city.

"We should check these out then," David said and paused, biting his lip. "We should think about how we can go about this. I mean, I can see it would be risky to include anyone else, but I'm not sure how we're to pull this thing off being only five agents."

Don had started shaking his head even before David had finished. "We don't know how well connected our guy is. We don't know where he has his eyes and ears or if maybe he has allies somewhere, be it in the NSA, the FBI or SWAT. We can't risk alerting the wrong people by requesting back-up."

David tilted his head. He could see Don's point, but that didn't solve the problem they were facing. "Alright, but in that case we still have to decide how to go about this. We can't split up to check out both places at the same time, because if we do, we run the risk that either Connell's parents or that uncle inform him about what's going on and he might find another hiding-place for Charlie." _Or kill him_, he added silently.

His words were met with silence until eventually, Nakamura voiced the real problem at hand. "We can't do anything as long as we're not sure where Charlie is or whom exactly we're up against. Even if we arrested Connell before checking out those places, we run the risk of his accomplices feeling threatened and acting rashly."

"We need to make sure before making a move then," Don decided as though it was the simplest thing in the world, but David could see from the tense muscles around his jaw that Don too knew that they had hit some substantial difficulties. Nevertheless, he hadn't given up hope yet and when he turned to Nakamura, he was fighting hard to keep his demeanor efficient and commanding. "Can you get access to up-do-date satellite imagery?"

Nakamura frowned. "Actually, I can. I'm just not sure it's going to be enough for us. I mean, we may spot something suspicious, but even if they brought Charlie to either of those places, it's still possible we may not be able to positively say that they did, especially if they brought him there at night."

"It's worth a try," Don decided and turned to Amita and Larry. "Could you go through those images? I remember that Charlie did something like this for us before, he kind of laid a filter over the footage that would tell him whether something, like in this case a car or a van or anything, could be found in that frame or not."

Amita nodded. "We can do that, and then we can insert this program into another one that goes through the footage automatically frame by frame. You're right, this should save us a lot of time."

"Good. In the meantime we should check Connell's movements by looking at his cell-phone information. Do we have those?"

Nakamura nodded. "I gathered the cell-phone data of all the twelve suspects." He must have felt their eyes upon him, so he added, "None of those was logged in anywhere near Charlie's car ever since he'd been at that crime scene Monday afternoon, I already checked that. But if we assume that we're dealing with a team of kidnappers, that doesn't mean anything. After all, your mugshot already told us that none of these twelve was the one to drive Charlie's car from CalSci's parking lot."

David could tell that Don was struggling to give his face a confident expression. "Good," he said with his mouth while his eyes were speaking a totally different language. "Megan, you take a look at that cell-phone information and I suggest that the rest of us examine everything we have on Connell more carefully. The more we know about him, the better our chances of finding Charlie."

They all nodded and allocated the different tasks among them. David glanced at Don and couldn't help but feel a little awe at his ability to keep it together. Sure, they could all tell that he was much more worried than he was letting on, but he was still functioning on a level that should be high enough to do his job, which in this case meant a level high enough to get Charlie back.

Well, he better had be.

And yet, despite his show of fierceness, David realized that Don was far less hardened than he usually was, he appeared to be more trusting, and the entire time they had been here, he hadn't even made a comment about Alan looking over their shoulders, let alone told him to let them work alone, as he normally would have done. But then again, what about this case was normal?

While David waited for the files to copy and be opened on his screen, he let his eyes wander to the head of the Eppes family. He'd been very quiet the entire evening, and yet his tension and worry had always been palpable, they had always filled the room and tainted the atmosphere of professional effectiveness that lay in the air, giving it a human component that David didn't quite know what to think of. True, they were all personally involved in this case and maybe it would be good for them all if they didn't lose sight of that, but on the other hand, it might also be better for their effectiveness to ignore that fact and concentrate on the task at their hands.

Charlie's old laptop for its part, while indeed a little slow, had performed its task and David scrolled through the bank account data to the point of time when it was relevant for them, around the time of Charlie's assignment for the NSA. At first glance, he couldn't see anything off. There was Connell's income, there were some expenses, and like Colby had said, they were more or less balancing each other.

"So you think he asked his parents for help?"

David flinched. He'd been so immersed in his task that he hadn't noticed Alan approach him.

"Well," he then said and thought hard how to phrase his reply without making Alan even more anxious than he already was, but without strengthening false hopes either. "It's possible. But we can't rule out that he found a more suitable place, could also be that one of his accomplices owns property." Which would actually be their best shot if the two houses they'd found so far didn't check out, since at bottom, Connell could have just picked any secluded spot in the rough vicinity of L.A. and hidden Charlie there. That, however, was a thought so pessimistic that David didn't dare to voice it. "Why do you ask?" he therefore tried giving their conversation another direction while he was telling himself that he just had to spend a little time on appeasing Alan in order to then be able to work efficiently – without constant interruptions by a worried dad.

"I simply cannot imagine that this Agent Connell could hide Charlie at his parents' house. I mean, there's almost nothing that parents wouldn't do for their children, but this..."

David sighed. "Well, I hate to tell you, but I've seen parents do things for their children that even went beyond hiding a kidnapping victim. And I've seen parents do things _to _their children that were equally bad. The world's a pretty messed-up place."

Alan just gave a grunt at that which David didn't know how to interpret, but he chose to continue his task and try to find something on this bank account that might give them another viable location – or anything that might link Connell to the kidnapping and show them that they were finally on the right track and not chasing another shadow.

"What is this?"

David flinched again and had to fight impatience when Alan's hand was blocking half the screen, which didn't make it all that easy for David to read the line he was pointing at.

He frowned. "I'm not sure," he then said, "but we can find out."

More in order to appease Charlie's anxious father and maybe thereby get rid of him gently than because he would have actually nourished hope to find anything of relevance, David googled the enterprise that was listed as the recipient of the sum Alan had expressed interest in. When his search had yielded results, his frown became deeper.

"A storage unit," he said half to himself, half to Alan who was still peering over his shoulder. He turned around to look at the head of the Eppes family with renewed respect. "How did you know?"

Alan's focus never left the screen. "I figured he had to put some of his belongings away when they had to sell the house. My wife and I had to do this too before we could afford this house."

David thought for a second. True, a storage unit was something they hadn't considered until now, but after all, it wasn't very probable as a hiding-place either. The risk of being overheard or seen by other tenants of the storage unit facility was just too great as if the kidnappers and Charlie were likely to be found there.

"We can check it out," David therefore said with caution in his tone, "but you shouldn't get your hopes up. I don't think we're going to find Charlie there. It's –"

"I don't think so either," Alan interrupted him, "but it's an industrialized area. Could you open a map?"

David did so while wondering when Alan had become a federal consultant. Then, however, he remembered that his expertise in city planning had already helped them on their cases more than once, so maybe he shouldn't be surprised if something came out of this after all.

"See here," Alan said and pointed at a spot on the map that David had opened on the screen, "this is the storage unit that this Agent Connell rented. And now these buildings here," his finger depicted an arc at the north-east of the storage unit, "they're all out of use. The city is planning on tearing them down, they're planning to build a park here and an area with residential houses over here."

That was enough for David. If Connell had stumbled upon this area during one of his visits to his storage unit, it must have seemed like the perfect hiding-place to him, and David had no trouble imagining that he might have thought of this spot when he found himself in the situation of having to hide away a kidnapping victim. All of a sudden, this storage unit, or rather the area around it, seemed at least as promising a lead as the two they were already following.

"Listen guys," he called the others' attention to himself and explained to them what he and Alan (though mostly Alan) had found out.

"Okay," Don said with a look on his face that showed that he wasn't sure whether or not he should feel hope, but he evidently decided to trust his father's judgment. "Let's check it out. Amita, Larry, could you check the satellite images also in that area, and Megan –"

"He wasn't there," Megan interrupted him before he could finish the order. "Or more to the point, his cell-phone wasn't. I just finished checking all the entries since Monday, and all the places his cell-phone has been logged in during that time was his home and the NSA office and the route he took to get from one place to the other. Apparently he also made a stop at a supermarket twice that wasn't directly on his way home from work, but also that spot is far from either of the three places we're looking at."

David moistened his lips. That lead on Connell had seemed so promising. Was he innocent after all? Had they wasted some other valuable minutes?

Panic threatened to settle in. They were already feeling as though time was running through their fingers like the sand of an hour glass, relentless and without any chance to hold onto it or make it slow down, making each second, each grain of sand so much more valuable that it seemed an unforgivable sin to waste one of those.

"He might have left his cell-phone at home whenever he went somewhere else," Colby pointed out. "Whoever's behind this must assume that sooner or later, his movements might be looked at, so maybe he took precautions."

There was some silence. "It's possible," Don finally said, but nobody could miss the fact that the hopeful elation that had been in the air had been exchanged by something much more depressing. "Anyway, you should check this area out as well, just to be on the safe side," he told the two scientists before they all set to work again, and at that moment, it hit David. They had come so far. They had figured out so many things already that the kidnappers would have liked to stay hidden, they were coming closer to the truth step by step, and yet, it was not only possible that they were wasting valuable time, but it was also very well possible that all their efforts might be in vain, because it was very well possible that they were already too late.

* * *

Charlie was still trembling with fear when he heard Bill and Tony come back. He didn't know how long they'd been gone. Time had become a disintegrated series of moments, and after each moment Charlie would feel glad that he'd overcome it and trepid that he might not be so lucky with regard to the moments to follow. Watching those moments pass was becoming so draining that he would have liked to just jump ahead in time, no matter what it was that was waiting for him in the future.

In any case, Charlie's sense of time had been messed up so badly that he couldn't tell how long Bill and Tony had left him alone. Maybe an hour? Or two? Had it been long enough to go after Don?

He shuddered and told himself once again that they wouldn't do that. Don was an FBI agent. It was far too dangerous for them going after him, they would risk people getting suspicious.

On the other hand, weren't people already suspicious, at least Don and his team?

He shuddered again. This was driving him crazy. Until now, as weird as it seemed, he'd still had some control over his situation in here, he'd been able to decide between keeping his silence and pain on the one hand and giving his knowledge away and thereby choosing death on the other. His choices had been restrictive, true, but he'd still known what would happen, he hadn't just been a puppet in their hands, not in the degree he was now. Now, he had no control whatsoever what they would do, worse, he didn't know what they had already done or would do to others, like Don, and this constant insecurity and sheer impotence had made his stress level rise to a point where the beating of his heart was becoming painful. Had they already gotten to Don? Had he made a mistake, could he have done something to prevent them from going after him?

Before he could turn the questions over in his mind further and go completely mad over them, the door to his cell was flung open and he froze. Eric was standing in the door, the third kidnapper, the one that Charlie was afraid of most, because he was the one Charlie thought most likely to kill him by accident, by simply being too fierce in his 'interrogations'.

He roughly sliced through the bonds that were holding Charlie to his chair, obviously not caring in the slightest that he was also slicing Charlie's arms in the process.

"Get up!" he then said gruffly and pulled him to his feet. The movement sent a searing stab of pain through Charlie's shoulders. He let out a cry and stumbled against the other man, his feet wouldn't hold him. Eric was dragging him along the corridor and into the hall, thereby confirming Charlie's suspicions about what he was planning.

For a moment, the thought of running away crossed his mind. Eric seemed to be alone, he only had to overpower him to get out of here, and right now only his hands were bound together. If he managed to incapacitate Eric by a quick blow against his face or his guts or his groin…

As tempting as the prospect of breaking free was to him, Charlie couldn't uphold that kind of wishful thinking for long. He wasn't strong enough to hold himself upright, much less to run away, and with his hands bound together and his arms or more to the point pretty much all his muscles refusing to obey him, he would never get out of the door, at least not before Eric would have caught up with him.

When he heard the outer door go again, his plans were abandoned for good. While Eric was still busy bringing down the fastening device that would soon be around his wrists, he heard two pairs of steps coming closer, and this time, it was indeed Bill and Tony that appeared in the door.

"What are you doing?" Bill asked angrily as soon as they had set foot in the large hall.

"Making him talk," Eric retorted with just as much irritation in his voice. "Since you guys don't seem to get it carried off."

"And what the hell were you thinking doing this on your own?" Bill shot back. "What if he had broken free?"

Eric laughed. "Look at him! You don't actually think he could get away in the state he's in?"

Bill gave first Eric, then Charlie a dismissive glare and finally said, "He might have. You shouldn't have taken such a risk."

"And you shouldn't be such a wuss," Eric countered sharply. "Just look at that wimp! How come you haven't gotten anything out of him in all this time?" He cut the bonds around Charlie's wrists and pulled his arms in front of his body, and Charlie couldn't stop himself from crying out with pain. Eric took no notice of that, but instead fastened the bonds around his wrists that were connected to that pulley-like structure that Tony had put up yesterday evening. "I'll show you how to make this little pansy talk."

"Don't be an idiot!" Bill told him sternly. "There's a reason why we've been taking our time with him! We don't have any real time pressure here, but if you go too hard on him now, you might spoil everything. You have any idea how often I read about torture gone wrong?"

"So stand by and stop me if you think I'm being to rough on him. But it's time we finally show him what pain really is."

_No,_ Charlie wanted to hold him back, but he couldn't get the word out, and truth be told, his objection wouldn't have him gotten anything but maybe laughter. With wide eyes, he watched Eric grip the rope that went over the support beams on the ceiling and down to his wrists and he tensed up, afraid of the pain. Then he saw him pull, and a moment later, his whole thinking was turned off. He just heard something snap in his shoulder, a sound so loud it almost seemed as though his bones had exploded and splintered into a million pieces. He was overcome by a wave of pain so strong, so all-consuming that he didn't know where it started or ended, and then, there was nothing.


	15. Trust the Team

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1

* * *

**Chapter 15: Trust the Team**

They were sitting in Don's SUV and Megan was eyeing her boss with some apprehension. Don certainly didn't look good. Apart from the dark smudges under his eyes that, granted, they were all adorned with, the pallor of his complexion didn't seem healthy and his posture and his movements were so tense that the simple act of breathing seemed to be becoming a hardly conquerable obstacle for him. But in fact, they all had hardly had the time for breathing.

In the end, it had all happened very fast. In the early hours of the morning, Amita and Larry had determined that there was indeed some suspicious activity in one of the areas they had examined, namely in the complex of warehouses near the storage unit Connell had rented. They had pinpointed the warehouse in question and they were positive that it was the kidnappers' hiding-place. They hadn't spotted Charlie himself and neither could they be sure that one of the cars belonged to Connell, but the timeline fit: no activity until Monday, then some come and go since early Tuesday morning. In any case there was hardly any risk of alerting the culprits if they were wrong, so they had all soon agreed on checking this place out as soon as possible. And now, they were here, in the middle of a run-down industrialized area during one of L.A.'s beautiful, sunny, cloudless mornings, and all they had to do was wait for the rest of their team to arrive.

Megan still wasn't sure what to think about the fact that they would need to go in alone, without any back-up, but she'd realized the necessity of keeping things to themselves, even though it felt wrong that they didn't trust anyone enough to let them in on their plans. Nakamura hadn't even put up a fight when they had decided to renounce on his team members' help as well. Megan still felt uneasy when she thought back at the grim expression on his face when the question had come up. _I think you're right,_ he had agreed with Colby's refusal to count them in. _I mean, don't get me wrong, a couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have __had __any doubts about trusting them. But in light of recent events... I mean, we still don't know how Connell learned about Charlie's involvement. He may have found out himself, but it's still possible he gained knowledge from someone closer to this project._

So while she was still having a bad feeling about this, she had understood the necessity of doing this on their own eventually. Her team was right, they still didn't know how well their opponents were informed. True, Charlie's code alone only gave them access to information exchanged with and within the NSA, but their investigation had shown that going around the security code of the telecommunication software wasn't all that the perpetrators had up their sleeves. They had manipulated the DNA database, for starters. It was easily conceivable that their had their eyes and ears even within the FBI.

"You think this is a mistake?"

Don's raucous voice made her turn towards him. He was staring straight ahead and the muscles in his face were so tense she thought they might snap. She frowned and looked down at his hands gripping the steering-wheel tightly, and indeed, they were shaking a little.

"I mean," he went on and was talking a little more quickly than he normally did, "we're not really in a good state of mind, and maybe we should order backup after all."

Megan shook her head. What was Don doing? Alright, she could understand he was nervous about this, but he was displaying a level of insecurity and doubt that wasn't advisable in a situation like this, when they were minutes from entering unknown territory. "You said it yourself," she reminded him, "we can't risk alerting the wrong people."

He nodded and she could see him swallow hard. "I know. I'm just..." He sighed and ran his trembling hands over his face, then looked at her with so much despair in his eyes that she shrank back from him a little. "What if we mess this up? Or if we're too late? If we went through all this and now..."

He bit his lip and didn't finish, but Megan still heard him. She could tell how badly this situation was messing with Don, the newly found hope and at the same time that incredible fear that something might go wrong after all. And if that happened, if something happened to Charlie because they messed up, there was no doubt in her mind that it would break Don. He'd lost his brother once already, if he now lost him a second time after everything they had done to prevent the catastrophe, she knew it would be too much for him to bear.

The main problem was, or so Megan would have said yesterday, that he was trying to deal with everything on his own. For days, he'd been closing up like an oyster and pretending to be fine while they could all tell that he wasn't. This, however, was different. The pretense was gone, he was letting her see how hard of a time he was having, and that was what worried Megan more than anything. Don hated letting anybody in. If he did, there was something definitely wrong with him, and Megan wasn't sure how to deal with that, she had no experience with this insecure side of her boss.

Therefore, she didn't find anything to say before he continued. His tone was a little firmer now, but she could still discern the fear in it, an uncharacteristic touch. "I need you to do what you have been doing. I promise I won't fire you or suspend you or anything, but you can't let me go through with this if it's wrong, you can't follow me blindly in this. We can't allow ourselves to waste any time with a wild goose-chase, and –"

"We're not," Megan quickly assured, a bit appalled by Don's insinuation. "I'm not following you because I'm afraid of disciplinary actions, I'm following you because I'm agreeing with you. We have good reasons to believe that Charlie's in there, and we have good reasons to believe it's better not to call for further back-up. This is the right thing to do, Don."

She saw him swallow again and search her eyes. "This is what you really think, right? I can count on you to tell me what you're really thinking?"

There were a lot of things Megan could have replied, she could have explained how he had no reason to doubt her loyalty, but every reason to trust her, but what she did say was a mere single, "Yes."

He nodded and swallowed again, apparently to get his voice back. "Thanks. I know I don't deserve this after how I treated you these past few days –"

"Stop it," she cut him off and actually started feeling a twinge of anger at him. She gave him a stern look and made sure here voice was clear and steady when she spoke, "Don, this isn't a time for second-guessing. Maybe we've made our mistakes in this case, maybe we got sidetracked too often, But you need to believe in what we do. We need to look forward now, not backwards."

He still didn't look convinced, so she added, "We're good, Don. None of us has been in their right mind lately, but that doesn't matter, because we're a team, and we don't just stop being a team when times get rough." She could see that her words had hit their mark and were sinking in, so she went for the final stroke. "Now Charlie's one of the team, and he needs our help. So this is what we're going to do, we're going to go in there and get him out. That's what matters now, and nothing else."

He closed his eyes and took a shaky breath. When a few seconds later he opened his eyes again, the insecurity was gone and someone very close to the old Don was back – still worn out, still worried, but with an agenda on his mind that nothing and nobody would stop him to see through.

* * *

From the satellite images, Amita and Larry had been able to establish that the kidnappers – if that was who the cars belonged to – had always used one of the front entrances, while the layout told them that the building also had another entrance in the back. That was the one that David, Colby and Don used to get access while Megan and Nakamura were carefully checking out the front entrance and were going to intrude as far as they could without being noticed by the men inside.

The warehouse was larger and more contorted than Don would have thought. He had already lost sight of David, who had separated himself from them only a minute ago in order to inspect another hallway. There were large machines in each room, even in the hallways, that blocked their way and prevented them from seeing what was just around the corner. At least, Don thought, that would also keep the kidnappers from spotting them too soon, or so he hoped.

Suddenly, they could hear sounds and after a second Don identified it as music, probably coming from a radio. The corridor had just made a turn to the left and they still had a couple of rooms to search – Don could see five doors in total –, but it didn't seem prudent to do that now when they could be heard from the people inside. The building was looking old and run-down enough that screeching doors wouldn't surprise Don in the slightest.

Instead of checking out the rooms to their left and right, he and Colby silently inched forward until they had reached the end of the corridor that was leading into a large hall. The communicating door whose rusty hinges could still be seen was missing so that their sight into the hall was unhindered. The view _inside_ the hall, however, was practically non-existent. Large machines were filling up the space, rendering the large room a confusing maze. Their view to the left was relatively unhindered though and that was why even in the relative darkness, they could see the motionless figure whose hands were apparently fastened to a rope connected with the ceiling.

"Looks like he's out cold," Colby whispered.

Don had heard him, but didn't react. His whole energy was focused on his brother, on trying to detect a sign of life. It wasn't possible from his position. Charlie had his back towards them and they couldn't even see him fully. Even so, however, they could easily detect that his position wasn't a comfortable one.

"We need to get him down," Colby continued and Don made an effort to regain his focus. Colby was right. First step: ascertain the victim's safety.

He took in the room and its outlay. Judging from where the sounds of the radio and the voices were coming from, the kidnappers couldn't see Charlie from their position, they seemed to be in a smaller room at the far end of the hall, or maybe just in a separated niche. In any case, there was a wall of machinery between them and the source of sounds that was very much to their advantage. Besides, there was a faint glimmer of light coming from over there while Charlie was very much in the dark, something else that was working in their favor.

"We need to make sure he won't give us away if he wakes up," Colby went on. Don could sense his piercing gaze from the side and turned his head to look him directly in the eye. "Can you do that?"

Don directed his eyes back at his brother and clenched his jaw, forcing himself to be professional about this. He realized he was slower than he usually was, less quick to give orders, otherwise Colby wouldn't just have taken over command. He needed to pull himself together, he needed to be at his best now. He could do this. Thus, he gave Colby a brisk, determined nod.

"You should stay with him back here while I join the others so we can take care of the bad guys, the two of you should be safe here."

Don nodded again, telling himself to swallow his pride and instead trust Colby's judgment and be grateful to him for doing what needed to be done. "Let's do this," he then whispered and stood. There was no reason for further hesitation.

As they drew nearer, they could hear the distant sound of the radio, but with its volume so low that voices could be heard over it, even though their words were indiscernible. Don bit his lip. He could only hope that the kidnappers weren't listening too closely to strange noises from outside their niche.

They had decided against drawing their guns to avoid making more noise than was absolutely necessary, but Don had to admit that walking around this warehouse with his service weapon at a place that was not his hands was making him feel exposed and vulnerable. There was no way to help it though, not now anyway. They were only a couple of feet from Charlie and this close, Don was sure he could see the rising and falling of his rib-cage, a sign of life. He pressed his lips together hard, not allowing himself any emotion, but fixated on going through with their task.

They were nearing him stealthily, noiselessly, unwilling to risk startling him and making him react in a way that would put them all in jeopardy. Don had a feeling though that they wouldn't have needed to worry that much. Charlie was so still that Colby seemed to have been right earlier, he had to be either unconscious or sleeping, in any way unaware of his surroundings.

Now that they were so close, close enough to see him properly despite the darkness, Don had to restrain himself mightily not to sharply draw in air through his nose. What earlier he had thought to just be an optical illusion could no longer be blamed on the light or the angle. There was something off about Charlie's shoulder, the shoulder blade was sticking out at an angle that made Don's stomach turn and that didn't leave any doubt of it being dislocated. He bit his lip. If he was right about Charlie's injury, the only way to keep the pain bearable would have been to keep his arm still and not put any strain on it, two things that were definitely not given in Charlie's current position. So the pain had to be excruciating, and with a sick feeling in his guts, Don wondered how long his brother had been forced to endure this position already. In any case it was now much more probable that Charlie wasn't merely sleeping, but that the pain had put him out.

He couldn't think about that now, though. What needed to be done now was getting him out of here, making his pain stop. He exchanged a look with Colby and they got into position. He was fighting to keep his breathing level, for this was the most precarious part of their mission, and the right timing was key.

When they had made sure they were both ready, they made their move. While Colby was holding Charlie's legs, Don was encircling his upper body and covering his mouth to prevent him from crying out. A moment later, Charlie came back to life, revolting against the hold and trying to get free. Don strengthened his grip, pressing Charlie's head against his own shoulder, trying to minimize his brother's movement, to minimize the risk of him hurting himself. Charlie's breathing had become louder, too, he was gasping. It probably wasn't loud enough to be heard in the other room, but they shouldn't take any chances, so they had to act quickly now.

"It's okay, buddy, it's me, Don," he whispered into his brother's ear. "We're gonna get you out of here, okay? You just need to relax, okay, just calm down."

He could feel a tremble go through his brother's body, but after a second or two, he nodded and Don felt the tension in his limbs lessen a bit.

"Yeah, that's it," Don went on soothing and slightly relaxed his grip to give Charlie an opportunity to breathe a little more easily. "I'm going to take my hand away now, but only once you're sure you can keep quiet, okay? That means no hard breathing, no moaning and above all no cries of pain. You think you can do that?"

He felt Charlie take some deeper and slower breaths that already reassured him enough before eventually, Charlie gave him another nod.

"Okay," Don said as he slowly took his hand from his brother's face, though otherwise maintaining his hold. He could still feel the tremble in his brother's body and wasn't sure whether it resulted from pain or fatigue or cold or a combination of all three of them, but he couldn't allow himself to dwell on that question anyway, they had more pressing matters to discuss. He didn't even take the time to ask Charlie whether or not he was okay, for he knew it wouldn't be efficient. He could tell that his brother was hurt and that he needed help, the sooner the better, so instead of talking, Don's goal had to be getting him out of here as fast and yet as safely as he could.

"You know how many kidnappers there are?" he asked instead.

"Three," came the raucous whisper from Charlie, an unnatural, broken sound. "Though one's gone most times."

"You know whether or not they're armed?"

A slight shake of the head. "Don't think so."

Don nodded. This was about what they had been expecting. "Alright, buddy. Colby's going to cut you off now. We'll try to be careful, but I think it's still gonna hurt quite a lot in your shoulders once there's movement there, so I'm gonna put my hand back over your mouth, okay? You'll still be able to breathe through your nose, I just need to be there in case the pain gets the better of you."

With another nod and no further arguing, Charlie accepted his fate and Don laid his hand back over his mouth while Colby pulled his knife out. Without further hesitation, he sliced it through Charlie's bonds with one hand while he was holding up his wrists with the other.

The rope snapped and to Don, it seemed as though a bomb had gone off in the middle of the desert. At the same time, his mind told him that the sound couldn't have been that loud. Still, he waited tensely, ready to defend himself in case they had been discovered by the kidnappers. All they could hear though was the quiet conversation from the other room, no sign that their actions had been registered.

Charlie's legs hadn't been able to support him and he'd fallen against Don, who was holding most of his weight. Until now, Colby was still holding up Charlie's hands and arms, and while Don could feel that the muscles around his brother's jaw had tensed up, he hadn't cried out so far. Once Colby would lower his arms however, this was probably going to change, so Don made sure his hand was in place.

He hadn't been wrong. Charlie's whole body went stiff as Colby brought his arms down and the groan could be heard even despite Don's best efforts. They waited for another bit, but the kidnappers still seemed to be unaware of what was going on directly under their noses.

Charlie's breathing had become more regular and deeper again and for a moment, Don could feel panic rise inside him. Charlie seemed to be slipping away again, into oblivion, and Don feverishly thought what he could do to keep him in the here and now. He willed himself to stay focused though and when the first wave of panic had released him again, he realized that it was probably better this way. As long as Charlie was out, he wasn't in pain, and as long as he wasn't in pain, he wouldn't cry out. As much as his brother's drifting in and out of consciousness was disconcerting Don, he had to grasp the opportunity it was offering them and embark on the next step of their mission.

He thought for a second. He'd planned to take Charlie under his arms while Colby took his feet, but given the strain that had been put on his brother's shoulders for who knew how long by the way they'd fixated him to the ceiling, that approach didn't seem very advisable, especially since he wouldn't have a free hand to stifle his brother's cries of pain.

"I'll take him," he therefore told Colby. "You cover us."

A brisk nod from the former soldier and they gently laid Charlie down on the floor. Then, Don carefully brought one arm under his brother's upper back and the other one under his knees, waited for Colby to be in position to suffocate any sound from Charlie that might give them away, and then took him up.

Few moments later, he was in a niche close to the spot where he and Colby had hidden earlier and carefully lowered his brother on the floor again.

"You're good?" Colby asked while Don was busy lowering his brother's head inch by inch until it was lying on the cold concrete.

He nodded. "You go get those fellows. And take care," he told his team member before he turned back to Charlie to attend to him. It felt wrong to be out of the action and leave the rest to his team and Nakamura, but when his eyes fell on his brother, he knew he was doing the right thing. And anyway, he wasn't letting his team down, he was still doing his share by guarding the backdoor leading to the hallway, the entry to the hall that he and Colby had used.

He was bending over Charlie and tried to block out the destruction he saw on his little brother's body while he was trying to find a position for his hands where they could comfort him without hurting him. "Everything's gonna be alright now," he tried to soothe him in a whisper, "this'll all be over in a minute."

He bit his lip when there wasn't an answer. Feeling his anxiety increase, he decided that they were at a great enough distance from the kidnappers to let him make sure his brother was still alive and lucid.

"Hey," he said a little more urgently than before as he was carefully shaking Charlie's unharmed shoulder, though not daring to raise the volume of his voice. "Stay with me, okay?"

There was a feeble nod, but from the looks of it, Charlie was still drifting in and out of consciousness. His eye-lids were almost shut, or at least so it seemed. Don couldn't really tell, both for the dark and the swelling on his face.

Half against better knowledge, Don's eyes searched his brother's body for further injuries while he was telling himself to keep his ears open in order to become aware of unwanted company immediately. The most apparent injuries, apart from the ones on Charlie's face, were the bruises and burn marks on his torso. Don bit his lip as he took in the sheer number of those. Some of the wounds had already started healing and also the bruises were sporting the whole range of the rainbow, so that had to mean that Charlie had endured this kind of physical abuse from the very beginning, probably since Tuesday, perhaps even since Monday night.

Today was Saturday.

Don shuddered at the thought and forced himself to look back at Charlie's face. Only now did he become aware of the shaking. Charlie's whole body was shivering with tiny tremors, and his skin felt cool under his touch. Don hesitated only briefly. It might take another couple of minutes for his team to get into place and then some time until the bad guys would have been overpowered and brought away, so even if he might cause his brother further discomfort by doing so, it seemed to be more rational to keep him off the cool concrete floor.

"Easy now," he whispered as he dragged himself closer to his brother, bringing his hands under his back. "We gotta keep you warm until this is over," he explained and got behind him, encircling Charlie's torso with his arms and leaning his brother's back against his chest. He could feel that Charlie had tensed up and his breathing had become flat, but once they were in position, it slowly became better again, until he could feel his brother's curly head loll back against his shoulder. He tightened his grip, desperately telling himself that it was all going to be fine, that they would get him help in a couple of minutes.

Suddenly, there was a loud noise, as though a chair had been overthrown or kicked against the wall. In spite of himself, Don flinched a little, and he couldn't help but feel a twinge of relief when he felt his brother flinch as well.

"It's okay," he whispered in his ear over the bustle that had broken out in the other room. "I've got you."

He became aware that he was gripping Charlie's upper arms rather tightly while he was straining his ears to listen to what was happening at the front, so-to-speak. Was his team in position already? Had Colby found the rest of them? Could they get close enough to the kidnappers without being seen?

Don pressed his lips together and told himself to take deep and calm breaths. He just needed to trust his team. Still, he would have given a lot right now to be able to see what was going on. This kind of audio drama was making his adrenaline running far more than he needed it to. It was even worse than being in the field himself, at least then he had an overview of what was going on – and the opportunity to control the outcome.

* * *

Colby was watching the brothers intently while Don was easing Charlie on the floor. His eyes were fixed on Charlie's bare chest that was sporting a myriad of smaller injuries. _They're gonna heal_, he told himself and tried to avoid looking at the crooked shoulder that was standing out in a grotesque angle, as though Charlie's upper body had become a piece of modern art.

"You're good?" he asked Don while his gaze was lingering on Charlie's pale face. His eyes were mostly closed, only fluttering open from time to time for a couple of seconds. At least he seemed to be aware of what was going on in those intervals, but that couldn't keep Colby from observing that he was mostly out, probably due to pain or maybe general exhaustion.

"You go get those fellows," Don's words interrupted his train of thoughts. "And take care."

Colby nodded and took another look at his friend's battered body before he turned away. He had to keep a clear head, this still wasn't over.

_He's fine_, he kept telling himself, desperately trying to get the image of the pale face with the deep lines of pain out of his mind. _You got to him in time, he's gonna be alright._

_Is he?_, another voice in his head asked, a more serious, less optimistic one. Sure, Charlie was alive, they had come 'in time', but given the amount of his injuries… Yes, none of them seemed to be serious per se, save perhaps what they had done to his shoulder, but the sheer amount of them was evidence of what Charlie had had to endure over the course of several days. Even if his wounds were going to heal, just how deep were the scars of the wounds that had been inflicted on his soul?

Colby shuddered, in spite of himself. He was suddenly reminded of his own experience in the hand of hardened criminals, just a few months ago. It was true, he'd bounced back by now, the nightmares had stopped, he could think back at that event without shrinking back. But he was an agent, being in dangerous situations and coming out of them was more or less in the job description, while the job description of a math professor was more likely to advise ducking when students started throwing pencils at you. How was Charlie going to deal with whatever he'd had to endure while he'd been in the kidnappers' hands?

_You did all you could_, the first voice was back, forcing Colby to turn away from the sinister depths of his mind and back to what was efficient, to what needed to be done. Before he could do that though, the other voice stepped in, with the smallest of questions, jingling, clear and soft, _Did you?_

He shooed the voice away, but the words were echoing from the corners of his mind, their tone becoming deeper and louder, like the relentless growl of a menacing dog that had taken up his scent and wasn't going to let it go anytime soon. He knew he could have done something, he knew he could have prevented all this from happening, if only he had paid more attention that evening in Charlie's office…

His mind was taken off his musings when he spotted David at the far end of the hall. He gestured to Colby's left and there he could see Megan, so they were well positioned in order to take out the kidnappers. But where was Nakamura? Was he with Megan and Colby just couldn't see him? Or had they split up and he was somewhere else in the warehouse?

He licked his lips. There was neither opportunity nor time for lengthy information exchange. They'd have to move in now, as long as they still had the element of surprise on their side. Besides, from the looks of it they should get Charlie to a hospital rather sooner than later. According to the layout, the kidnappers had to be cornered now, so this was the time to act.

He looked over at Megan who seemed to have come to the same conclusion. She was signaling them to prepare for attack and with quick and efficient gestures communicated her plan to overpower the criminals. Then, with her fingers, she counted off the seconds: _three, two, one –_

"FBI! Freeze!"

The two kidnappers that had been engaged in lazy conversation whirled around at the newcomers, freezing indeed. Only a fracture of a second later, the older one reached for the gun lying on the table, but Colby cut him short.

"Don't even think about it!" he shouted. He could hear Megan and David slowly draw nearer, all of them closing on on the kidnappers. "Put your hands above your head, slowly."

"Hold right there!" a voice made them freeze. It was coming from a dark corner to Colby's left, somewhere behind Megan, and it was boding ill. "Lay down your weapons now, or I'll shoot."


	16. Tying Up Lose Ends

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1  
**A/N:** Thanks for your kind words, they make writing even more enjoyable :)

* * *

**Chapter 16: Tying Up Lose Ends**

"Lay down your weapons now, or I'll shoot," the voice said.

The FBI agents exchanged glances, but kept their weapons pointed at the two men in the niche. The tension in the air couldn't be missed, it was the calm before the storm. The fronts were hardened and battle seemed imminent. No matter in which way the criminals were going to react, the feds certainly wouldn't go down without a fight.

Before the situation could escalate further, he hastened to get closer as quickly and yet as stealthily as the situation demanded.

"NSA! Slowly put down your weapon and lie down on the floor!"

They all turned in his direction and the fracture of a second later, the federal agents turned the tables as though they had it all planned and trained beforehand. The element of surprise that yet another party had entered the scene was working very much in their favor. Without a moment's hesitation, Granger and Sinclair were closing in on the two kidnappers at the table, pinned them on the floor with swift and well-trained moves. Before the perpetrators knew what was happening to them, they were subdued and cuffed, and the feds made sure to secure their weapons.

Nakamura himself was a bit surprised by the velocity of their actions and when he saw that Granger and Sinclair were in no need of his assistance, he turned around to Agent Reeves. She, however, had in the meanwhile turned around to the third kidnapper and, with a well-aimed kick that seemed to come from some Asian martial arts, had disarmed him and then cuffed him as well.

Thus, within less than ten seconds, all the criminals were lying on the floor, and Nakamura couldn't help but feel a little awe at his fellow agents' quick-witted performance.

Now that there was no imminent danger coming from the kidnappers, he lowered his weapon a little and turned to Agent Reeves whom he accepted as first in command in this raid. "I'm sorry," he explained. "I saw him go in, but I was a little too far behind. I lost sight of him for a moment."

She accepted his apology easily and he told himself that to do himself justice, he couldn't have done a lot more, being only one man to keep an eye on practically one whole half of this large and confusing building. "It was perfect timing," she said and he could practically watch the tension slowly leave her face as she spoke. She didn't seem to feel too comfortable with her role of second-in-command having to step up, but granted, it had been an unusually risky raid with unusually high stakes, and they were probably all glad it was over now.

"We should stay together," Reeves continued. "If we keep watching the entrances to this hall, we should be able to react presently in case there are any more unwanted guests."

_Better safe than sorry,_ Nakamura thought as he nodded his consent.

He turned around his own axis, though always keeping watch of the three kidnappers out of the corner of his eyes.

"What about the third door?" he asked, remembering the building's layout. From their position, they had no trouble keeping an eye on the criminals while at the same time guarding the two doors that Agents Reeves and Sinclair must have used to gain access to the hall, but there was still one door missing, which meant that there was still one risk too many.

"Don's taking care of that," Granger replied. "He and Charlie are behind that pile of pallets."

Nakamura nodded again, thinking he could spot the upper edge of the pallets the other agent was talking about somewhere behind all the tons of metal and rust. He glanced in the direction of those pallets and lowered his voice a little as spoke. "How is he?" he asked and felt his heart-rate quicken a bit.

"Banged-up," was the slightly dismissive reply. "It didn't look like he's hurt too seriously, but he definitely didn't look fine."

Nakamura swallowed. That didn't sound too good. "I'm sorry," he said, well aware how inadequate the phrase was, but unable to bring more order to the thoughts swirling around in his mind.

"Yeah," Granger said, but was looking in the direction of the Eppes brothers, although they couldn't be seen from their position. "You need some help over there?" he called out to them.

Nakamura tensed when there wasn't an answer immediately and was just about to see what was going on at their end of the hall when Eppes's calling out made him relax a little, "Just call an ambulance and make sure they get here asap!"

"Got it!" Granger shouted back and Nakamura watched his face harden further. He let him make the call and then joined him, some yards away from the other five people, yet still close enough to make sure none of their perps was trying anything hinky. He swallowed nervously, trying to gauge the distance and figuring out how much he'd had to lower his voice so that they wouldn't be able to overhear him.

"I've been meaning to apologize to you," he told Granger before he could change his mind and trying to find the balance between a low enough voice and a firm tone. "I think it's time we cleared the air, for I don't think we got off to a good start."

When he could tell that he had the other agent's attention, he took a deep breath and went on, "Remember when I accused you of trying to make me your scapegoat? Well… I guess that was a classic case of projection. I'm… I'm not exactly proud of myself with respect to this case, you know?"

He watched the other man nervously, but was unable to gauge his reaction.

"This is more than just a case," Granger replied coolly.

"I'm aware of that," Nakamura put in, but Granger wasn't finished yet.

"And Charlie's my friend. I sure as hell didn't try to find him in order to find something to go after the NSA. I was trying to save his ass, I wasn't misusing him for anything."

Nakamura swallowed hard. Right. He'd said something like that, he remembered now.

"I'm sorry I said that. It was unnecessary. And I can see now I was wrong."

"Dead wrong," Granger specified. Nakamura felt his gaze on him, scrutinizing him. He kept the stare, but couldn't help but lick his lips when the stare continued for several seconds that felt like ages.

"Let's scratch all that," Granger eventually decided. His face was still grim, but Nakamura could no longer find the hatred in it that until now had been so omnipresent. "We got to him in time, that's what matters."

Nakamura nodded and shook the hand Granger was stretching out towards him. He could agree with that.

* * *

Tensely, Don listened to what was going on at the other end of the hall, but was more than a little displeased with his lack of information. The radio was still playing and drowning the voices of the people at the other hand of the hall, but even without the music, they would probably still be so muffled that he couldn't have discerned any words. He knew though that if nothing had drastically changed, the kidnappers were safely restrained and his team had gained the upper hand, thanks to Nakamura's timely intervention. Don was still trembling from the adrenaline that had started pumping through his body when the third kidnapper had entered the scene. Once he'd realized what had been going on, it had taken him another half second to drown the feeling of panic. Then, he had grabbed his gun, determined to get his team out of the mess he'd led them into, but before he'd been able to get Charlie off of him and get up, Nakamura had entered the scene – and saved the day. So now, guilt and relief and worry about his brother were balancing each other while Don's mind was telling him that now, everything was going to be alright. Still, there remained the insecurity stemming from the fact that he had stopped being part of the actual operation while he was stuck in this niche with a little brother who at first glance seemed more dead than alive.

_He's fine_, Don told himself for maybe the hundredth time while he made sure to feel the steady heartbeat under his hand and the rising and falling of the battered rib-cage.

"You need some help over there?" Colby's loud voice made him start then.

Don thought for a second. Did he need help? There was no doubt about it. However, there was also no doubt in his mind that anyone without some medical expertise and equipment would be equally useless as Don was feeling right now. No, his team had better watch the criminals and ensure their own safety, the more they were to guard them, the better.

"Just call an ambulance and make sure they get here asap," he therefore told them.

"Got it!" was the shouted reply.

"Hear that?" he said to his brother. He was still keeping the volume of his voice down, though not for fear of being overheard anymore, but rather because he didn't really trust it right now. "Help will be here soon."

Another feeble nod against his shoulder and he tightened his grip again. Help couldn't come too soon.

"Don?"

The voice was feeble, too, and Don felt a sense of alarm growing inside of him. "Yeah, buddy?"

"I'm okay," Charlie's soft, raspy voice sounded, and Don wasn't sure whether it was a statement or a question.

"Of course you are," he therefore said and made sure he could feel him under his hands, his warm, breathing body. "You'll see, they're gonna patch you up in no time."

"They only wanted to cause me pain, not inflict any severe injuries on me," Charlie continued mumbling, slurring the words, but showing a clarity of mind that Don wouldn't have thought possible in his state.

He tightened his grip further, unwilling to think about the implications of his brother's words. He only knew that he hadn't been appeased by them. Even though the kidnappers' goal might have been not to inflict severe injuries on Charlie, evidence suggested that they hadn't been very successful in doing that, while they had been extremely successful in causing him pain.

"You can stop worrying about me," Charlie went on. "I'll be fine."

"Yeah," Don just said, not wanting to argue. Maybe he'd remind his brother of his assessment later, when they'd had a talk with his doctors.

He could hardly wait_._

* * *

With a deep sigh, David leaned back in his office chair, laid his head in his neck and ran his hands over his face. He was exhausted. He was tired and hungry, he had a head-ache and his right eye-lid had started twitching as though he was missing a type of mineral or something, but still, he was feeling a whole lot better than he had in days. They had done it. They had found Charlie, they had taken down the bad guys and they had closed the case without anyone getting hurt or even killed in the process. If someone had told him that yesterday, he would have merely given that person a lenient smile and felt pity for their illusionary thinking.

They had just finished their interrogations for the day and all that remained now was paper work while their kidnappers were being brought to spend the night in a holding cell.

Even the interrogations had gone much more smoothly than David would have expected. Not only had they managed to refrain from physical abuse against the men who had beaten their friend to a pulp, but they had even gained some solid information. True, the two accomplices that Agent Connell had hired were keeping their silence, but he himself must have realized that cooperating with the authorities was his best shot. He was aware that the FBI had found out enough to incriminate him, not to forget that with Charlie, they had a witness who could testify against them and whose injuries were proof enough to lend credibility to his story if needed. Therefore, Connell was ready to fill in the blanks and thereby make sure that one, his accomplices were accredited their share of the crime (or more, for as long as they didn't present them with any counter statements, the agents couldn't be sure), and that two, his cooperation would be recognized at the trial.

And so, probably at his lawyer's advice, Connell had confessed to everything that he thought they had already found out or would soon find out anyway. He'd confessed to having hired Tony and Eric to kidnap Charlie and then help with the 'process of information gathering', as he had put it, and he'd also confessed to hacking into the NSA's telecommunication program and into the DNA database. Apparently, he had started to explore those gray and black areas after his wife had fallen into the coma, and with time and little other things to spend his time on, he had gradually developed and optimized a way to gain money with his specialties. Only when the new code had been implanted in the NSA's system, he'd found himself in a position of needing further assistance, and he had soon thought of his old friend Andrew Bourgeois.

David was a little surprised at how quickly Connell had been ready to confess to killing him (although, as David reminded himself, the confession had only come after they had taken his DNA to do another, more reliable comparison with traces found at their first crime scene). Given the evidence, David was even tempted to believe Connell's account of a fight having ended tragically. Apparently Bourgeois, whom Connell had known from his time in college, had been ready to help him understand Charlie's code and thereby gain some cash to solve both their money problems – not only was Bourgeois sympathetic with his old friend's situation, he too was rather broke after his divorce and some bad investments. When, however, he had found out that Connell was trying to break that code in order to sell sensitive information, information that might affect national security, Bourgeois had refused to help him further. In the ensuing fight, he had hit his head against the desk and according to Connell, he'd been dead instantly, and after the initial shock, he had erased all his traces and set up the webcam and microphone in order to know whether or not he would become a suspect. Only then had he learned about the notebook, and only then had he realized that with Charlie, there was someone who knew about the code and thus someone who presented a threat to him by being able to put the feds on the right track. At the same time, however, Connell had realized that Charlie was also a valuable source of information.

Still, despite everything that Connell had revealed, David wasn't ready to accept everything he'd told them as the absolute truth. For example, he wasn't sure about his claim that it had been his accomplices rather than himself that had pushed for a more violent way to arrange both the kidnapping and the questioning, and he doubted that Connell, as he claimed, would have left it for them to decide what to do with their victim once he had served his purpose. Looking at their criminal records, there was hardly any doubt in David's mind that Tony and Eric had been hired to not only kidnap Charlie, but also to eventually kill him and dispose of his body.

And yet, David wasn't sure how much guilt would be assigned to Connell once he would have his trial. He was a smooth talker and his tragic life story was bound to instill some pity among the jury. On the other hand, he was a traitor of his country, and David himself had no doubts in his mind about him: Connell was a gambler who had played and lost, he was cold enough to pursue his personal goals no matter the risks or the consequences for either himself or anyone else. True, it might have been the slow, distressful death of his wife that had turned him into this reckless egotist, but still the danger he presented to the public couldn't be dismissed. But how to deal with that, David knew, was for the court to decide.

The ringing of a cell-phone made him look up and when he saw Megan answering hers, he sat himself up straighter and his exhaustion was forgotten. They'd been waiting from a phone call from Don for ages, it was long overdue, and the tense look on her face immediately confirmed his hunch that it was indeed him. He eyed her reaction with hardly bearable tension, tried to guess what was spoken between her and Don, and when he saw the relief wash over her, he would have almost laughed out with joy.

"He's okay?" he asked when she had said her good-bye, but before she had actually finished the call.

She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes, and David's good mood got a little dent. "Under the circumstances, yes," she said. "His shoulder was dislocated and apparently it wasn't that easy to reduce it, but eventually they managed. They're still not sure if it's going to heal completely, but at first glance, all the damage is principally reversible. His other injuries are relatively superficial. He'll need to undergo some further testing during the next couple of days because they need to rule out that the electric shocks caused any nerve damage, but they're considering letting him go for the night."

"They _what_?!"

David turned around to Colby, whose mouth was still hanging open.

Megan shrugged. "Don said he seemed a lot better after they'd reduced his shoulder."

David hesitated, because for a moment it seemed as though Colby wanted to say something else, but when the surprise kept him silent, he asked nonetheless, "Do you think we should pay him a visit?"

Megan shook her head. "Larry and Amita are there too, and with them and Don and his dad… I don't know, I think it might be a little too much for him tonight."

David nodded, telling himself not to feel disappointed. Or anxious, for he himself hadn't gotten a good look at Charlie before, but he knew that Colby had, and given his reaction, he would just have liked to make sure and determine with his own eyes that he was alright.

"What about Don?" he asked instead, thinking of the haunted look his friend and boss had had in his eyes for the past few days.

This time, Megan's shrug definitely seemed a little uneasy. "I think he's doing okay," she said, but seemed to be choosing her words with caution. "In any case better than during the last couple of days. But then again, I guess the past week hasn't been easy on any of us."

She averted her gaze just like she had averted the subject and busied herself with bringing the papers on her desk in order, and David couldn't help but feel that there was something on her mind that she wasn't telling them.

Before he had decided whether or not to pry into the affair, Colby emitted a deep sigh and leaned back in his chair. "Alright, bring it on."

Both he and Megan looked at him with surprise, both lacking understanding.

"What do you mean?" Megan asked.

"Just get it over with. Say it."

She shook her head as if in an attempt to get rid of some cob-webs confusing her thinking. "Say what?"

"That we were out of line these past few days. That I should have never beaten up Nakamura for starters, that we never should have worked this case and all that."

She averted her eyes again, but David could see her face harden ever so slightly. "What do you want me to say? You know that already."

Colby stood, and from the way he pushed back his chair that slid against his desk with a loud _thud_, David got the uncomfortable feeling that he was getting caught up in the middle of a fight between his two friends, and he wasn't sure on which side of the fence he was going to land.

"Yeah well," Colby said, his anger showing through his words, "we can't all behave like saints all the time and follow all the rules to the letter."

"I know that," Megan replied, apparently aiming for a calm tone, which was, however, somewhat tainted by her grim face.

"But?" Colby prompted.

"What do you mean?"

"Come on, I know that look!" he exclaimed. "You're dying to patronize us on what we did and what we should have done! But let me tell you one thing, Megan, we did the right thing, for whatever we did, Charlie's still alive because of that, so you can say all you want, you won't make me think that we were wrong in doing what we did!"

Megan bit her lip and didn't say anything for several seconds, apparently warring with herself whether or not she should make her point. In the end, she chose the confrontation after all. "Maybe that's the problem."

When David saw that Colby's mouth was hanging open, he noticed that he himself wasn't better one jot and quickly closed it again.

"So you're serious?" Colby asked, his voice brimming with incredulity and indignation. "You think we should have let Charlie rot in there? Tell him that sometime! Tell him that you'd rather have them continue what they did to him rather than bend the rules a little!"

Megan's jaw was clenched, so at least it didn't seem to come easy to her to maintain her calm. "We represent the law, Colby. Our job is to uphold law and order, not be the first in line when it comes to breaking them."

"We saved a life today! Wouldn't you say that's more important than adhering to some bureaucratic nonsense?"

Her voice was sharper now. "We're not talking about nonsense, we're talking about laws that serve to protect the general population!"

David's jaw had dropped again, but he had stopped caring. He'd been watching the exchange, like a tennis match, and wasn't sure whether he was getting this right. From the looks of it, Colby was feeling a similar way. He was staring at their friend and co-worker as though he was seeing her for the first time.

"Good then," he said when the blow of her words had abated, and there was something final about his tone. "Glad to know where we stand. I mean, it's good to know that I can't rely on you to save my ass if it requires you to leave a t uncrossed."

There was a fire in her eyes that left David hoping that she wasn't what the exchange had made it seem. "You know that's not true. We did 'save your ass', didn't we?" she pointed out and the words didn't fail to hit their mark, although David thought that maybe he felt the sting of her words even worse than his partner. After all, he hadn't been as ready as the rest of his team to come to Colby's rescue when he had gotten into trouble with the Chinese. "We're a team, so of course we bail each other out if necessary. That holds for you and it's the same with Charlie. He's my friend, and I would have done anything to get him out of there, just like you were ready to do whatever it takes. And I think we can all clap each other on the back for being a good friend to him and getting this done as a team, but I also think we can't really congratulate ourselves for having done a good job in this case as agents of the law."

Her words were met with silence and David was looking at Colby, waiting for a sharp reply, but there was none. There was something about her words that they couldn't just shake off. David couldn't deny that he hadn't always felt at ease during the past couple of days, not just because of Charlie, but because he hadn't felt right while doing his job. There had been moments when things had seemed… just not right. And yet, Colby had been right too, the fact that they had succeeded seemed to somehow justify their actions in hindsight. If they'd had more qualms, if they had always followed the rules, Charlie would still be at the mercy of his kidnappers, and given the state he'd been in this morning, there was a good chance he wouldn't have lasted for much longer. So in that light, how could anyone argue with the claim that they had done everything right?

"You know…" David started and tried bringing his thoughts in order. "I think sometimes, upholding law and order in general might require you to go against specific laws. You know, maybe this is indeed the best system possible, but it's still not without flaws. We can't just turn off our common sense and adhere to the laws blindly. We need to examine each and every case individually and then decide what's right."

"I'm aware that we shouldn't blindly adhere to the laws," Megan said a little impatiently. "I'm just wondering whether going against specific laws might not have become the rule rather than the exception."

She let the words hang in the air and then took a deep breath. She ran her hands through her hair, then sat up a little straighter and seemed to come to a conclusion. "Look, I don't even know where I'm standing on this myself, I just need some time to make some sense of it all. But this has nothing to do with Charlie, or with you," she stated very clearly and actually broke into a little smile. "You know I love you guys, and I love being on this team. So let's not talk about this whole mess tonight, okay? Tonight, we need to celebrate."


	17. Aftermath

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1

* * *

**Chapter 17: Aftermath**

The rain was pouring strongly as they were driving through the night, and Don had to concentrate hard to be able to properly see through the windshield. Keeping his eyes on the road was getting even harder by Don's urge to constantly check the state of his fragile and already damaged cargo, namely his battered little brother on the passenger seat. His pale face seemed to stand out against the darkness, and Don even thought he could see pearls of cold sweat on his forehead.

He bit his lip nervously. This was a mistake. True, when Charlie had decided to get himself released from the hospital at his own risk, Don had voiced his doubts, but apparently, he should have shown more firmness in the matter. Charlie should have stayed at the hospital, he wasn't fine by a long shot. On the other hand, they wouldn't have been allowed to stay with him during the night, and Don knew that as hard as it was seeing the broken figure beside him outside of a hospital bed, it would have been so much harder to leave him there behind.

"We'll be home soon," Don said, mostly to interrupt the thick silence. He gave his brother another side-glance. To a less attentive observer, it might have seemed as though Charlie was sleeping. The deep lines of pain on his forehead however told Don that he wasn't so lucky to have fallen into a restful slumber, he was still in agony. "You okay there?"

Charlie gave a grunt that was probably a better answer than what Don should have expected to a question as stupid as this. He clenched his hands around the steering-wheel. This was a mistake…

Suddenly, there was a loud noise and before Don knew what was going on, his car broke away to the right. He instinctively gripped the steering-wheel more tightly, trying to keep the car on the road, but it was already too late, the road was gone and they were thrashed around in the car as though it was a giant's snow globe. Feeling utterly helpless, Don felt the car tipple over to their right and a moment later, he lost orientation when they were tumbling down the hill.

The world around him had stopped making sense, it had stopped being coherent, the order was gone. There was only confusion and darkness and chaos, and the sick feeling in his stomach that something was going horribly wrong.

Then, it was over. The movement had stopped and Don carefully opened his eyes. The lights of the dashboard had gone out, but there was still enough light coming in from the outside to let him examine his surroundings.

He turned to the passenger seat.

"Charlie? You okay?" he asked and gently shook his brother's shoulder.

There was no reaction, the figure beside him remained motionless, and Don felt a shudder run down his spine.

"Come on, buddy, wake up," he said more urgently and reached out to turn his brother's face around towards him.

He froze. From under heavy, half-closed lids, Charlie's eyes were staring back at him, yet not looking, it was an empty stare, a broken one.

"No," Don whispered when he realized what this meant, that the emptiness in his brother's stare told him that there wasn't a soul to be found behind those still, dark eyes, not anymore.

"No, no, no" he repeated more frantically and told himself that he was mistaken, that it wasn't true, that it wasn't that bad, that it couldn't be that bad. He tore his eyes away from his brother's face, away from those two black pools of soullessness, and was about to check him over, to find the real reason for Charlie's unresponsiveness.

As soon as his gaze fell on the rest of his brother's body though, he shrank back violently. He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn't, he couldn't tear himself away from this awful sight, he was forced to go on looking at his brother's broken body, and he felt so sick that the urge to find a release from this burning pressure sent tears to his eyes. His brother's body had become unrecognizable, it hardly had anything left to determine it had been human once. The limbs were contracted, the flesh burnt off and the skin appeared waxen in all those places where it wasn't charred.

"Charlie," Don whispered with tears in his eyes, taking in the burnt corpse that only seconds ago had been his brother, and the pain in his chest became so overwhelming that he would have done anything to discard it. Yet he couldn't tear his eyes away from this awful sight and now that he saw the destruction of the hell fire that had come over them, he could feel the wrecking heat in himself as well. He could feel the red-hot charcoal smoldering in his guts, creating a heat that had already risen to his head and begun vaporizing his brain, a heat that was now reaching his heart and singeing off its edges, tugging at the broken organ and leaving it bleeding, leaving it in a state where there was no wholeness, neither in health nor in consumption, only burning agony.

* * *

He felt hot and instantly knew he was sweating. His eyes were darting across the room, panicked, but only when he kicked off his covers did he realize that he was home, in bed, that it had only been a nightmare. For a moment, he just sat there, unable to do anything, unable to move. He stared ahead at the wall opposite his bed where he could still see Charlie's burnt corpse and he pressed his palms against his eyes, breathing hard. He willed his brain to forget about that image, but he didn't nourish much hope, just like he no longer dared hoping that those nightmares would stop anytime soon. He'd hoped to have left those behind now, he'd been hoping for them to become a thing of the past now that they had Charlie back, but apparently, that had only been wishful thinking.

_It wasn't real,_ he told himself again and again, trying to calm down and willing the trembles that went through his body to stop. _It's okay, it was just a nightmare, it wasn't real._

His breathing slowly became a little deeper, steadier, and the tremble was soon restricted to his hands. He sighed shakily and took them from his face, then shook his head to get rid of that horrible image of the burnt corpse. He lay back down and closed his eyes, but was immediately confronted with Charlie's dead and broken stare and quickly sat himself up again. As he was staring at the wall opposite his bed, he came to a decision. Sleep was no longer an option for him tonight, so he could just as well get up and make himself a cup of coffee. Had to keep his eyes open somehow.

He was being quiet in order not to wake up his family, but he hadn't even reached the top of the stairs when he realized that they weren't sleeping either, at least not both of them. There was a faint glimmer coming from downstairs, probably from the kitchen from the looks of it, and he could hear that the electric kettle was running. Apparently he wasn't the only one thinking of coffee in the middle of the night.

He made his way downstairs and soon could see his brother's figure standing there in front of the kettle, looking somewhat frail and small. He had his back toward him and Don hesitated making his presence known. Charlie seemed to be in deep thought, he was standing motionless staring at the kettle that had by now ended its task. However, instead of going on making the tea he had prepared, Charlie continued staring at the kettle, or maybe rather at something deep inside his head.

Don slowly drew nearer, suddenly uneasy. With his hand hovering towards Charlie's upper arm, he approached him with caution, always prepared to draw back in case his brother might bolt like a wounded animal.

"You okay there?" he asked softly as his hand gently made contact with his brother's arm.

The reaction he was met with was more forceful than he'd expected. Charlie flinched violently and whirled around, falling short of overthrowing the boiled water by inches. He was staring at him with wide eyes – wide, but living, as Don couldn't help but notice – and held himself at the counter he was stumbling against. Don was about to re-fasten his grip of Charlie's arm, because for a moment it seemed as though his knees were about to buckle, but an instant later, Charlie was standing steadily again.

"You mean despite the heart attack you just gave me?" he gasped and took some more breaths before he actually answered Don's question with a quick, "Yeah, I'm fine", busying himself with the electric kettle in order to avoid his eyes.

Don watched him silently, saw the slight tremble of his hands, the tense muscles around his jaw. His eyes were hidden by his curls, but Don could imagine only too well the chagrin in them. He knew that his brother wasn't 'okay' by a long shot. Maybe it was going to get better on its own, or maybe they had to think a little outside the box to make him whole again, maybe convince him to seek the help of a professional. Whatever time would bring, however, Don realized that it wasn't going to make Charlie feel better tonight. At this very moment, there was nobody there to make things better for his brother than Don himself.

The problem was that Charlie didn't seem to be too keen on opening up, which was the crucial step if Don was to help him. So he had to ease into this conversation, he had to give his brother the opportunity to open up to him without exerting pressure upon him.

"Couldn't sleep?" he asked eventually and tried to keep his tone light. It worked remarkably well.

Charlie gave him an awkward half-shrug, still encumbered by his shoulder, and wiped up some water he'd spilled when he'd poured it into his tea cup before giving him an actual answer. "I have some trouble finding a comfortable position."

He kept his gaze on the cup with a diligence that really wasn't needed for the tea to get ready for drinking. Don was silent. He had known his brother long enough to be convinced that he wasn't lying, but that he wasn't telling the truth either. Sure, he could easily imagine that Charlie was in too much pain to sleep through the night – hell, when he thought back of his brother's state not even 24 hours before, he was surprised Charlie was well enough to be standing upright. The pain killers and especially the reduction of his shoulder had done wonders though so that, with a little help, Charlie had been able to leave the hospital on his own two feet. He was still pale, still sore, but, and Don was grateful enough to notice that, very much conscious.

Too bad though he hadn't gotten any pain killers or reductions for the injuries on his soul.

Don bit his lip. He wasn't sure whether Charlie's physical health issues weren't enough of a topic to deal with for the time being. In the end, however, he realized that if he really wanted to help his brother, he shouldn't shy away from the problem that was preying on his mind. He just had to find a way to ease into it, and maybe the physical pain might at least serve as a workable conversation starter.

"If it's still that bad, why don't you just take another pain killer?" he asked.

Charlie gave him another one-sided shrug. "I don't want to take too many of them. Besides, it's not that bad. I mean, of course it's still hurting, but it's mostly the shoulder now, and now that everything's back in place, even that's not nearly as bad as… you know, earlier."

He blushed and averted his eyes again and Don had to suppress a sigh. They really had enough on their hands without Charlie developing some awry sense of pride. "You know there's nothing wrong with letting it show when you're in pain," he said and couldn't help but think back at his brother's obvious suffering when he'd been slipping in and out of it in that warehouse. It was no pleasant memory and he hurried to get on, "And there's nothing wrong with taking the amount of medication the doctors prescribed to you. They had their reasons for recommending such a high dose, and I'm not sure they would have let you go home if they had known that you were in too much pain to get enough sleep."

"It's not that bad," Charlie insisted, but his voice had gotten such a mumbling quality that Don had difficulty understanding him. He decided that this wasn't working. Charlie was still shooing away, he had to go for a more direct approach.

"So the pain isn't really what brings you here in the middle of the night, right?"

Charlie gave him the quickest of glances and the blush on his face became deeper still, so deep in fact that Don became seriously concerned for his blood flow.

Don had intended to suppress the sigh again, but found that he was less successful than the last time. "Buddy," he said and was searching for his brother's eyes, "what happened to you… it was really bad, and it takes some time to process it all. But in any case you got to talk about it."

Charlie was silent, his eyes still kept on his cup, and Don could feel his despair growing. He didn't know what else to do, he had no idea how to make his brother feel better. He was completely at his wits' end with this conversation. Yes, Charlie was his brother, he'd known him all his life, he probably knew better than anyone else how his mind was working, but this? How were they going to deal with _this_? They never had those heart-to-heart-talks, well okay, lately, but –

Suddenly, Charlie broke his silence, though so lightly and quietly that Don had to strain his ears to discern the words. "I don't even know where to start."

Don felt so relieved that he had to refrain himself from showing his elation too bluntly. The oyster had cracked open!

"Anywhere," he said quickly, before his brother would change his mind.

Charlie took a deep, yet shaky breath and kept addressing his cup, but Don was content with that. "I guess it wasn't too bad as long as they were gone. I mean, I was still miserable, my muscles would cramp up and I was cold and… you know..."

He paused for so long that Don wasn't sure he could bring himself to say it, so he tried to help, "Scared?"

Charlie nodded and swallowed thickly. "Every now and then, I would get these… I don't know, like panic attacks, and the walls seemed to be closing in on me and I couldn't breathe… But for most of the time, being alone was better than when they'd come back. I would..." He broke off, biting his lip and giving Don another insecure glance.

"It's okay, buddy. Just tell me."

He took another deep breath. "I would concentrate on P versus NP, you know, that Millennium Prize Problem that I –"

"I know," Don interrupted him. He remembered that problem only too well, since it had been the one that had kept Charlie in his garage instead of at their mother's deathbed during the last few weeks of her illness.

Charlie gave a little laugh, but it didn't sound happy by a long shot. "I guess I just keep falling back into my old routines whenever times get rough."

There was a bitterness in his tone that it hurt Don to hear, for he knew how guilty Charlie felt for how he'd spent the last days of their mother's life. This, however, was something entirely different.

"There was nothing wrong about that," Don therefore told him in no uncertain ways. "In a situation like this, you gotta do whatever helps you to remain sane."

Charlie gave another bitter laugh and this time, it sent shivers down Don's spine. "I didn't feel sane. I felt..." He broke off and Don watched the fingers of his left and uninjured arm grip the edge of the countertop as though his life depended on holding onto it, because it was the only fixed thing in the entire universe.

"Sometimes, I wished they would come back. I was so alone all the time, and I was wishing so much to get out of there and back to you… I was starting to feel less like a human being, because I was starting to forget what it was like to be around other people, or at least so I thought, and when they'd come back, there would always be a moment when I felt so relieved that there was finally someone else around, that I wasn't alone..." Another bitter laugh, another shiver down Don's spine. "G-d, I'm talking like some psycho Stockholm guy."

Don was shaking his head. "You're not."

_He's not_, he repeated in his head for good measure. Charlie was still sane, right? He could discuss his experience rationally, so despite his words, it wasn't too bad, right?

"You're still sane," Don insisted. "I mean, of course they got into your head a little, but that's normal. Look, I've seen my share of crazy, and you're not that." He forced himself to grin. "Not any more crazy than usual at least. 'Cause from where I'm standing, you're still the same Charlie that last week tried to explain to me how Markov chains prove that the Yankees never stood a chance against the Red Sox."

This time, the look Charlie gave him lasted for more than the fracture of a second, long enough that Don couldn't miss the surprise in it. "I didn't think you'd listened. You told me to shut up."

Don shrugged and tried to keep his tone light, but had to notice that it was now he himself who was intently watching Charlie's tea as he replied. "I'm your brother. That's my job."

He could feel a lump in his throat and told himself not to swallow it down for as long as he could still feel his brother's eyes on himself. Yes, he had told Charlie to shut up then, and yes, he would most certainly do it again. And yet, there had been many moments during the past week when he would have given anything to hear him talk of Markov chains one more time.

Out of the corners of his eyes, he could see Charlie nod and he thought he could see him lower his head even further. Don frowned. He didn't like that look on Charlie's face, it was… sad.

"Don, I… I'm sorry."

Don's frown deepened as he tried to decipher the look on Charlie's face. Before he could ask what on earth his brother was talking about, he went on, "I should have never written that email to you."

Don's eye-brows went up so high that they dispelled the furrows on his forehead. When he'd found his voice again, he said, "Buddy, writing that email was probably your smartest move in this whole mess."

Charlie didn't say anything to that, so Don, still not sure he knew what was going on in his brother's mind, went on explaining to him the basics of both survival and investigation. "If you hadn't written that email, we might never have found you. I don't think I would have suspected foul play, and Thompkins and Nakamura… I don't think they would have found you in time either."

"Still," Charlie insisted. "It wasn't fair to you."

Don shook his head, lacking understanding. "What wasn't?"

"It wasn't fair to not tell you anything and then when things went south send you an email," Charlie explained to his tea. "I mean, I can't expect you to come rescue me when all that got me into this mess was not telling you in the first place."

Don tilted his head. "You won't hear me argue with that."

He watched Charlie bite his lip and immediately took pity on him. "But it's alright, Charlie. I get it. You weren't allowed to talk about that assignment, that's the job." He hesitated, but he knew he had to make this clear to his brother, even though he was reluctant to attack him further in his current state, and be it only verbally. "Still, starting an investigation on your own… Face it, Charlie, that was just plain stupid."

Charlie's head jerked up towards him and the hurt expression Don could see on his face almost made him stumble backwards. "I didn't," Charlie defended himself. "All I did was write those emails and go over the code once more to see if I could further enhance it after all, but I wasn't planning on dealing with this on my own, never."

"Good," Don said as soberly as he was able to and decided to leave it at that. "Then I'd say you've been acting fairly rationally throughout all this. You shouldn't beat yourself up about how things turned out, I don't think you could have foreseen the chain of events in any way."

Charlie gave an irritable sigh and took his tea to the living-room, avoiding Don's eyes.

Don, with a frown, went after him. "What?" he asked.

"We may have been lucky how things turned out," he replied a little harshly, "but that still doesn't change the fact that writing that email was selfish."

Don let the words rerun in his head, but repeating them wasn't making them any more understandable. "Why selfish?"

Charlie had sat down on the couch and Don took a seat next to him and cringed when he saw the pain on his brother's face that, as he guessed, had little to do with his physical state.

"I never thought of what that might do to you," Charlie eventually said, his voice almost a whisper. "I mean, I kind of made it sound as though I expected you to get me out of this mess, as though it was somehow your responsibility, even though we both know that's not true. And I never stopped to think that they might…"

He bit his lip and had to blink rapidly to control his emotions. It was only after several seconds and slowed-down breaths before he went on with forced composure, "You know, I had found a way to get through it, kind of. I knew that if I didn't tell them about the code, they would hurt me until I did, but that also… I know it sounds crazy, but that also gave me some kind of control, over them, over my own fate, you understand? It was like even though they had taken away my freedom, I still had some choice, I could still decide what to do, and that gave me, I don't know, some sort of strength. But when they threatened to hurt you… I was just so scared and I was feeling so helpless because I didn't know what to do, and all I wished for was that I hadn't written you that email. It was just… I had thought I owed this to you. I mean, when I wrote it, I didn't really think they would do something to me, but I just wanted to make sure that in case they… they got me killed… I just thought you deserved to have some answers, I figured you'd want that. And I also thought that if there was indeed a problem with the NSA's telecommunication, someone should know and… well, I wasn't sure if Bob or Taro would listen to me. I knew you would."

Don was back to shaking his head. He could feel the emotions brimming in his chest, so he took care to keep his tone firm and sober. "Again: you'd be dead now if you hadn't written that email. I can't believe I've got to explain this to you, but taking safety measures is a good thing, so don't you dare feeling guilty for that."

He hesitated, but judging from the pinched expression on his brother's face, some openness and honesty might be for the best. "If you want to talk about selfishness, just think about how we would have felt if you hadn't written that email and we wouldn't have found you in time. Think about all the pain your death would have caused, and say again that keeping yourself safe was selfish."

Or maybe he shouldn't have cared for openness and honesty, for not only was the pinched expression still there, even worse, Charlie's eyes were becoming moist, until eventually, a tear was running down his cheek. Don watched its course, feeling as though his heart was bleeding, and thought feverishly what to say to make things better again. Then, however, he realized that it was probably better to just keep his mouth shut and let his brother do the talking before he'd put another foot in his mouth.

Charlie wiped the tear away and cleared his throat, but his voice still sounded a little husky when he said, "I never planned to drag you into this. I never thought they might go after you, and when they threatened to do so… it was the worst few hours of all, and I think… I think if I could have, if the pain hadn't put me out… I think I would have cracked."

He bit his lip and it took him a moment to collect himself, to be able to go on. "But I didn't. I kept my silence and that could have… they could have… I mean, it doesn't make any sense! First, by writing that email, I made it seem as though you were somehow obliged to save me, and then, when you did come for me, I threw you under the bus. I just didn't think they would go after you, but I had no way to know, and if they had..." He fell silent and wiped another tear from his face.

Don felt that his throat had closed up, so instead of saying any words that might or might not reach his brother, he put his arm around his back and held him close. For a minute, they just sat there in silence, listening to each other's breathing, to the steady rhythm of their lungs and hearts, the rhythm of living creatures.

"They didn't go after me," Don then said quietly when he'd found his voice again. "We all came out of it alright, that's what matters."

Charlie didn't say anything, but Don could feel that his muscles were still tense, so he obviously hadn't eased his mind. "You can't beat yourself up for whatever you did while they had you," he insisted, cringing inwardly when he thought about how his little brother had had to take their attacks and find some hidden resources to remain standing tall. "You had to do what you thought was necessary to stay alive, like writing that email, like keeping your silence, and I'm glad you did."

He felt Charlie nod before he slowly freed himself from his hold. Don let go, careful with his brother's shoulder, and tried to gauge from the expression on his face whether he'd actually managed to take the edge off his pain.

For now, however, his view was blocked by Charlie's hand that was wiping the moisture from his eyes, and when the hand was gone, Don was again confronted with the deep blush on his brother's face.

He didn't know what to say, so he was glad when his brother took the initiative. He cleared his throat and asked, his voice still a little unsteady, "So what about you?"

Don stared at him. "What about me what?"

"What brings you down in the middle of the night? And don't tell me you're fine, because you still look like you've seen a ghost."

Don continued to stare and it took him a second before he had pulled himself together enough to be able to close his mouth. How had his little brother managed to turn the tables so quickly?

He shook his head to get rid of the surprise and searched his mind for an answer. "I'm good," he eventually told Charlie's tea cup and suddenly felt the urge to stand up and go somewhere else, some place where Charlie's eyes couldn't scrutinize him. He couldn't do that, though, and he knew it. Charlie had opened up to him, he'd told him about his innermost thoughts and feelings. Escaping from this conversation now would have seemed like some sort of betrayal.

"Look," Don eventually pulled himself together, though still kept addressing the cup, "it's true, I'm… It was some really rough days, I won't deny that, and… well, maybe it might take me some time as well to get past it all. But I think we can do that, because if we came this far… I just feel like everything that lies ahead of us now should be manageable if we just face it together. I mean, in the end, it all went over fine, and I think that's what matters most, wouldn't you say so?"

He was eyeing Charlie now with hardly bearable tension, for he needed to hear him confirm his words, he needed him to say that despite everything, he was still relatively okay.

The smile that Charlie gave him was tentative and tainted by the exhaustion showing on his face, but it was a smile and if Don looked close enough, he could see that spark in Charlie's eyes, a spark that he'd already thought he'd lost forever.

"Yeah," he said, "I think we can agree on that."

* * *

**A/N:** Sorry, I just couldn't resist weaving in the parallel to the ABCs ]:-) Anyway, we have almost reached the end of this journey (just one little epilogue missing) and I hope you have enjoyed yourselves. Let me know :)


	18. Epilogue

**Disclaimer:** see chapter 1  
**A/N: **Thanks to everyone who stayed with me during this! I hope you enjoy this last bit!

* * *

**Epilogue**

"Are you sure you're up to this?"

Charlie looked heavenwards and had to restrain himself mightily not to roll his eyes. He loved Amita, he did, but if she asked him that question one more time, he couldn't guarantee anything.

"Could you _please_ stop asking me that?" he requested and was proud of the patience and understanding he'd managed to deliver along with the words. For he _did_ understand, he knew that she (and everyone else, for that matter) was just worried, but that didn't change the fact that their worries were starting to drive him crazy.

"I'm just saying, it's been only two weeks –"

"Two and a half," Charlie corrected her.

"– and you haven't even fully recovered yet," she went on undeterred with a meaningful gesture at his arm that was still held in a sling.

"That's only a matter of time. And you know perfectly well that I can do my job just fine with only one hand."

"I just don't want you to overexert yourself," she insisted.

They had reached the entrance of the FBI building by now and Charlie stood and turned around to her. True, he wasn't always very quick with understanding other people's feelings, but it was different with Amita. Besides, by now he'd had ample time to figure out what she was going through, enough time to know he finally had to address the problem at root.

He took her hand and looked her directly in the eye. "Stop worrying about me," he said very slowly and strengthened his grip on her hand when she gave a little incredulous laugh and tried to withdraw it. "I'm serious," he continued, searching her eyes until she lifted her head again and their gazes met. "I haven't been blind these past two weeks, you know. I can see what this has been doing to you, and I can't see you miserable like this any longer. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere, I'm not going to just disappear. I need you to believe that. And I need you to believe me when I tell you that I'm fine."

She cast down her eyes, but he could still see the blush on her cheeks that told him that his words had hit their mark. It was also a blush that made her look extremely lovely.

"You're right," she said ruefully. "I'm just… This hasn't been easy on me. All the insecurity –"

"I know," he interrupted her and took her in his arms, feeling her cling onto him and breathing in her scent. "I understand. I'm just asking you to understand me as well and… well, maybe stop wrapping me up in cotton wool?"

Her smile grew wider, he could hear it in her voice. "I'll try," she promised as she let him go again and stood back a little to be able to see his eyes, searching them as though they were holding the answer she had been seeking for a long time. "But I trust you to tell me when this is eating at you, or when there's anything I can do to make things easier for you."

He made sure to lock eyes with her and to keep his voice steady. "I promise."

The smile was back. "Good," she said and took his hand to pull him towards the security checkpoint. "We should hurry now, I think we're a little late."

He felt a smile enter his face, feeling relieved that they had finally settled this, but when the security checkpoint came in view, the uncomfortable tingling in his guts was back. Despite what he'd just told Amita and despite knowing that this was the right thing to do, that this was what he wanted to do, he was more apprehensive about going up there than he'd been for years, maybe as nervous as he'd never been before.

While he pulled out his consultant ID with fingers that were slightly reluctant, he tried to calm himself down again, telling himself it was all going to be fine, but his thoughts were interrupted by her unhappy exclamation. "Oh no! I forgot my ID in the car!"

She looked ahead at the security guards, then back in the direction of where they'd parked the car. They had thought to have plenty of time on their hands, so they had parked it at the far side of a nearby park and grasped the opportunity to go for a short stroll, but now that decision seemed to backfire on them.

"I should go up and get started," Charlie said with a look at his watch. "You could join us later?"

She sighed, obviously not too happy with that way to proceed, but they hardly had a choice. "Will you be alright on your own?"

As an answer, he raised an eye-brow, saying nothing.

The worry left her face and the self-conscious smile was back. "Alright, I get it," she said good-humoredly and put a kiss on his lips. "I _am_ trying," she made it clear to him, "you just need to give me a little time for the learning process." With that, she hurried out of the door.

* * *

Since Don was on the phone when Charlie arrived in the bullpen (with someone pretty important, as it seemed), he only motioned him towards one of the conference rooms, though not failing to give him a reassuring slap in the back as he left for that direction.

Charlie had expected the team to already wait for him and Amita, but apparently, they were still busy with other things, for he was the first one to arrive in the room. However, he hadn't finished setting up his laptop yet when the door opened again and Colby's head appeared in it, the rest of his body soon following after.

"Hey man, it's good to see you," he said with a slightly subdued smile as he heartily shook Charlie's hand – the left one – while simultaneously giving his left shoulder a pretty powerful pat.

"You, too," Charlie gave back and noticed that his own smile didn't fully reach his eyes either. Yes, he _was_ glad to be back, to slowly return to some kind of normalcy, but these were the first steps back in his old life, the steps that he'd been so apprehensive of and that he was finding so difficult. So much had happened between him and the team that he didn't know how to behave around them. Heavens, they had saved his life! How would he ever be able to thank them properly?

True, they had managed to create an atmosphere of normalcy last week, when his dad had invited them all over for a 'thanksgiving' dinner, but his father did have a way to exude calm and familiarity. This, however, was business, this was the job, and after everything that had happened, Charlie found himself too personally involved with Don's team members to not find this beyond awkward. The line between work and private life, the line between friends and co-workers seemed no longer to exist, yet they still needed to do their job.

"So how are you doing?"

Charlie flinched. Only now did he realize that apparently Colby had been watching him for several seconds before asking the question, and Charlie was suddenly reminded of Amita asking pretty much the same thing before they'd entered the building. He swallowed when he saw Colby's scrutinizing stare that seemed to request an actual answer to this normally so casual question.

"Fine," he said, telling himself he could hardly blame Colby for asking, for in contrast to Amita, he hadn't seen him since that dinner, and neither had Don's colleague been asking him that question several times a day for more than two weeks now.

"Okay," Colby said, but his eyes were lingering on Charlie, making him feel suddenly uncomfortable under the stare.

And yet, he _was_ fine. Well, pretty fine. Sure, he still had those nightmares, but they were becoming less, and it was getting easier for him to fall asleep afterwards. Yes, he still avoided the dark and always had to make light before he could take another step forward, but that would surely get better eventually. In any case, he _felt _better. Whatever he'd endured during that week of hell, it was a thing of the past. It was over now, his perpetrators had been arrested and would soon be behind bars for a very long time while he himself was back to freedom with his family and friends, safe and mostly sound.

"Charlie," Colby said and had adopted a tone that lately, everyone seemed to adopt when talking to him. "You need to talk about this."

It had to be the tone, but suddenly, Charlie felt a little ill-humored. They all seemed to be trying to fix him somehow. He didn't feel like being fixed though, he didn't need any fixing. Why were they all so obsessed with making him talk about his experience and unable to talk about any other subject?

He swallowed. He didn't like this. Their obsession was making him feel scared. True, there was no denying he was feeling better, but maybe that was only temporary? Maybe that's what everyone else seemed to realize while he didn't? Maybe there was something wrong with him and he just couldn't see it?

He tried to push the thought aside, but a hint of insecurity remained and made him defensive.

"I already did," he said and couldn't keep his voice from getting a slightly dismissive tinge to it. "With Don."

Colby gave a little laugh at that. "Yeah, well, that's great."

Charlie frowned and tried to read from the expression on his face what was so funny about this, but he couldn't find the answer there, so it seemed like he had to ask after all. "Why wouldn't it be great?"

"Because Don's still concerned about you, that's why."

Charlie shook his head. "He's not," he contradicted, but was met with Colby's stern gaze. "Alright," he corrected himself, "maybe he's still a little worried, but not that much, otherwise he would have never agreed to letting me consult on this case."

Colby chuckled softly. "Like you gave him a choice."

Charlie frowned. What was that supposed to mean?

"Come on, man," the agent said with a subdued smile, "you've been pestering him for over a week. Did you think he wouldn't tell us?"

Charlie's frown became deeper. As a matter of fact, he had. When he'd asked Don whether there wasn't something he could use his help on, it had been one thing for Don to turn him down, but he hadn't expected his offer to become a conversation topic at the office. And he had to admit, he didn't like it. He was getting tired of people talking about him and wondering what was good for him, even though he was sure they were all meaning well. Still, it hurt him. Why didn't they trust him to be able to judge for himself whether or not he was okay or whether or not something was good for him?

And even worse, why were they discussing all that behind his back?

"What is it to you anyway?" Charlie asked and couldn't help the fact that his tone had lost much of its usual friendliness. "Why do you care whether or not I talked to someone?"

Colby raised his eye-brows and if Charlie hadn't known any better, he might have thought that his harshness had actually hurt the agent a little. "Because I care about whether or not you're doing okay," he stated with a simplicity that Charlie didn't know how to deal with. This was exactly the kind of awkward moments he wasn't ready for. "In fact, we all do," Colby continued. "So if you need someone to talk to, I'm standing right here."

Charlie meant to say something in return, but didn't find anything, so he just nodded, not sure what to think about this offer. He was touched, he really was, but he also didn't have any use for it right now. "Thanks," he eventually found his voice again, "but I think I'm good. Really."

Colby nodded. "Alright." He still didn't look convinced, but his posture showed he was relinquishing the continuation of their conversation. "I'll let you get to that then." He gave Charlie's laptop a nod and turned towards the door, but halted when he'd reached it and turned around again. "Just… just remember that it's an offer that's always standing, okay? Even when a week from now or a month or a year you think you need to talk about it, you can still come to me, anytime."

Charlie frowned. Colby's insistence on that matter was starting to freak him out a little. "Thanks. I appreciate that," he said, but still couldn't let go of the uneasy feeling Colby's words had installed in him.

He let his laptop be again and straightened himself, searching Colby's eyes for something he didn't even know what it was. "I never asked..." he then began before he realized he didn't know how to phrase this. Maybe he shouldn't bring the subject up at all, but he felt like he had to, for he felt like Colby was trying to convey some secret message to him, that he was trying to tell him that no matter how well he was doing now, things were going to get so much worse.

"How have you been dealing with when you'd been… you know?" he asked eventually and swallowed thickly, anxious how the agent might take his prying.

Colby looked at him with first confusion, then surprise. "Oh, you mean what happened with the Chinese?" He seemed to think for a second. "I don't know, man. It kind of… everything just fell back into place, you know?" While Charlie was watching him intently, unsure whether or not he could take for granted what he was telling him, whether he was really okay, the frown on Colby's face leveled out and he flashed him a smile. "Hey, don't make this about me. I'm good. Really."

Charlie nodded and was fairly convinced that Colby was telling him the truth. "Okay," he said and hesitated before going on. He hated this. But there was probably no way to avoid this sort of talk, so he'd better just get it over with. "I was just wondering why you'd be so… supportive." _Persistent_ being the more suitable term.

Colby shook his head with emphasis. "That has nothing to do with that. Not directly at least. I mean, of course I guess I understand better than the most others what it's like to deal with something like that, but that's not why I asked."

"Then why?"

Colby sighed deeply and stared out of the window for several seconds without saying another word. When he turned back towards him, Charlie was a bit surprised that the expression in his eyes had changed. They were… He didn't know how to describe that look, he only knew that there was a sadness there he hadn't noticed before.

"Okay, look," Colby explained, though was showing an uncharacteristic degree of nervousness. "It's just… You need to believe me when I say that if I could change the events of that evening and change back what I did or didn't do, I would do that. But I can't, so I'm doing the next best thing, I'm trying to help you get back on your feet."

Charlie wasn't sure whether he'd missed something or whether it was Colby who wasn't making any sense. "What are you talking about? You couldn't have changed anything, you were long gone by the time they attacked me."

"I should have stayed," Colby insisted, making Charlie wonder whether he was serious. "If I had –"

"If you had," Charlie interrupted him when he found his voice was back, "they might have done away with you, too." He was searching the agent's eyes as if he could find some answers there, but that somehow desperate look still hadn't left them. "I'm not sure what it is you're doing here, but I can tell you that you have no reason whatsoever to blame yourself for anything that happened. You most certainly have no need to make up for anything."

Colby grimaced as though he was in pain. "That's not what I meant. Look, okay, so maybe... maybe I was trying to… you know, clear my conscience a little here, but that offer's standing regardless of whether or not I feel I have to make up for that. I just want you to be okay, that's all."

Charlie could feel a tugging sensation in his heart and he noticed that his throat had closed up. He cleared it and tried to put the words in his head in order so that he wouldn't make a greater fool of himself than inevitable. "Look, I appreciate this, really, I do. And I might take you up on that offer, I don't know, but right now... I don't know how to explain this to you. I mean, sure, I've had some really rough couple of days, and of course I'm not _fine_ in the way I was before all this, but… it's okay. I'm doing okay. I'm coming to terms with it. It's still an ongoing process, but it's… it's going well, I think."

Colby smiled and for the first time, Charlie felt like there was really someone who understood and trusted his statement, someone who was ready to believe that he was indeed doing okay.

"I'm glad to hear that," the agent said. Then his grin became wider. "And I'm glad you convinced Don to let you come back. We've missed you around here."

Charlie felt himself blush and was glad when the door opened and thus the focus was shifted away from him.

For about a second.

"Hey, sorry for the wait, Megan and David will be here in a minute," Don said as he rushed in. Then he halted and let his gaze wander between them. "Everything alright?" he asked, the slight layer of worry on his face that had been there more or less constantly for over two weeks now increasing again.

"Yeah," Colby said before explaining the atmosphere Don could feel in the room, "I just told Charlie how glad we are to have him back."

The layer of worry on Don's face became thinner and the furrows on his forehead less deep as he broke into a smile and set his eyes on his brother with an expression so fierce and yet so tender that for a moment, it actually took Charlie's breath away.

"Yeah," Don said with a little laugh, and when his smile persisted, there was a twinkle in his eyes that Charlie realized only now how much he had missed. "You got that right."

\- finis -


End file.
